Worth noting that they tried to sideline him a couple of years ago when Alex Green was brought in. As it turned out Alex was also pretty useless and was himself quietly disposed of from the company less than a year after starting (something that’s not widely known and was never reported).

The complete lack of either strategy or success from the Digital Publishing Division has largely been covered up by massaged traffic figures and creaming off classified revenue from offline. Perhaps most telling though is that John and his team were so bad that following the acquisition of The Scotsman the entire scotsman.com team (around 17 staff) made for the hills and resigned of their own volition. Scotsman.com, which was rumoured to account for about £30 million of the Scotsman publications purchase price has since been destroyed to bring it in line with all the other JP sites (notice the suspicious lack of recent ABCe Audits...).

Given the large scale of the company, Johnston’s Digital operation has always massively underperformed. I’ve always been surprised that this has never really been picked up on with media coverage. Given the recent problems the company has been having it might be worth someone’s time to dig a little deeper into there digital business (or lack of). Especially with regards to getting an ABCe traffic figure from them that matches the figures they were quoting in the annual reports…