SEE ALSO: Earnings: Johnston Sales Indicate Recession, Digital Slowed In Last Few Weeks

Gloating from the afterlife, former Scotsman.com editor Stewart Kirkpatrick has poured a torrent of “told-you-so” on the news site’s present-day proprietors, using his appropriately named Sour Alba blog to accuse Johnston Press of “ruining” the publication with its December 2007 redesign.

Kirkpatrick, who started with Scotsman.com in 2000 but who quit in 2006 for consulting, wrote: “I knew that traffic would tank. I warned Tim Bowder, the JP chief executive, of this face-to-face, saying the JP redesign would lose ‘millions of page views and hundreds of thousands of users’. My warning was ignored and a JP apparatchik later explained that I had not understood how good their plans were.”

Kirkpatrick gloated that traffic has halved since he left, as testified by our contribution to the war-of-words - a picture; this chart of ABCe traffic since 2002, which, in fairness, shows that the rot began before the redesign (though still after Kirkpatrick’s exit).