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The former online editor of the Scotsman will launch a new newspaper later this month.

The new news organisation, the name of which is yet to be revealed, will be focused on the Scottish market both at home and abroad, Stewart Kirkpatrick, now content marketing director and owner of w00tonomy, a content marketing agency, told Journalism.co.uk.

There will be a print element, but the new title will be web-first and feature 10 niche areas of interest, including politics, health and heritage, Kirkpatrick said, adding that a potential readership for these areas had been identified by the project's team.

"We're not doing everything. There will be no general news. We will curate that material. There will be a print edition, but it won't be daily and it won't even by weekly. It will be supplementary [to the website]," he said.

Despite the current state of the economy and the much-reported problems faced by the newspaper industry, there are readers and advertisers out there to support a new newspaper title according to Kirkpatrick, who has been planning this venture with his business partners for years.

"The newspaper industry's problems have to do with structure, not the market. There's a huge demand for informed analysis and in depth journalism and there's a lot of money that can be made from this if you are not saddled with printing presses.

"We're keeping our costs to an absolute minimum. We're operating on a very different basis and a very different structure to newspaper companies with legacy print editions. We don't have those costs.

"We're developing a newspaper that lives according to the realities of how the newspaper market is now."

Kirkpatrick has recruited an initial team of journalists for the launch and will look to expand this newsroom later in the year.

The journalists already hired have not yet been named, but are "a tested team of experts focused on certain areas", he said.

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Written by

Laura Oliver
Laura Oliver is a freelance journalist, a contributor to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, co-founder of The Society of Freelance Journalists and the former editor of Journalism.co.uk (prior to it becoming JournalismUK)

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