The founder of Scotland's first web-only newspaper, The Caledonian Mercury, today revealed more about the way the publication is created by a network of unsalaried journalists.
Speaking to the audience of journalists, journalism students and entrepreneurs at the Jeecamp even in Birmingham this afternoon, Stewart Kirkpatrick described how he was looking at how to find new ways of making journalism pay.
"When we started I looked to recruit people in way we didn't have to pay them – so it's a revenue share. If we have a good week, they have a good week. If we have a bad week, they have a bad week."
Kirkpatrick said he chose specialist journalists who already had established freelance networks because he didn't want to employ people whose mortgages were reliant on the venture.
"It's very much on a 'jam tomorrow' basis. There might be bits of muffin now but the main rewards are going to come further down the line."
Pressed further by a member of the audience, Kirkpatrick said recent payments to the journalists had been in the region of "several hundreds" to cover work created over a month or so.
The website started in January and has so far achieved one million page impressions and 500,000 users.
Virtual working
Although there is an office in Edinburgh's Hanover Street, the journalists are all part of a virtual team working remotely with laptops and mobile phones.
It's aimed strongly at a Scottish audience – for those at home and abroad – with journalists writing on specialist subjects. It's a mixture described by Kirkpatrick as "the Economist meets the Huffington Post, drinking Iron Bru".
Plans for the site's development include the addition of multimedia and the possibility of a printed version which would possibly be published on subscription.
Kirkpatrick ended his talk with the same tone of optimism evident in the earlier keynote from Simon Waldman.
"There's never been a better time to be a journalist, and there's never been a worse time to find a job in journalism.
"The future for journalism is not going to be getting that big job, it's going out and making your own top job."
