Launching Caledonian Mercury

Stewart Kirkpatrick: Let me finally stop being coy and get the important bit out of the way: I can now reveal that the name of Scotland's new online newspaper is The Caledonian Mercury.

There is a formal introduction to the paper on the site, but here I will give a bit of the background to how the CalMerc made it to the outside world.

For a start I'm writing this at 9pm on Sunday, 24 January, a mere three hours before it goes live on AMS.

The splash has just gone off-stone (well, I've just set it go live at 6am with all the correct SEO tags - but that description lacks a certain romance. Maybe I should think in terms of 'upload the front page'.).

I've been mulling an “exploding tartan inevitable” since before I left scotsman.com. I knew I'd kick myself if someone else did it first. But the practicalities were harder than a concrete bin full of hard things doing Chinese algebra.

Since then a few things have fallen into place: a couple of colleagues in Graham Jones and Tony Purcell who could handle the heavy technical lifting; a few ideas on print gleaned from Paul Stokes of the Daily Mash; some sage advice on commercial matters; and, of course, a hard core of leading journalists being prepared to take a punt on something new.

And it is new. Boy, is it.

NOTE: And that's as far as we got when allmediascotland's content management system turned into HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and - because of some technical bug - accidently outed us online a couple of hours too early.

Cue much shouting, swearing and frantic snag fixing. But it all goes to show that AMS is an incredibly powerful comms tool.

We have been complimented for our clever pre-launch campaign. In fact, the only proactive step we took was my blog post on AMS. All the coverage the Mercury has had - in The Guardian, Independent, BBC, Press Gazette, trade press, etc, etc - flowed from that.

(Finally, 'mad propz' (as the young people say) to Willie Paul, Head of Digital Communications at The Scottish Government, who happily told me the top secret name of my top secret new venture back on December 11. Like a good sport, he kept thoroughly schtum for six weeks.)

Stewart Kirkpatrick is a former editor of scotsman.com and content marketing director of w00tonomy.com