A couple of weeks down the line I’m still slightly surprised by The Scotsman’s reaction. It does seem to be something of an extreme case of corporate paranoia. I can only imagine that somebody in the ad department picked up a Google alert and complained to management. It’s well known that The Scotsman’s struggling to sell ads and it’s always handy to be able apportion some of the blame elsewhere. If there was genuine concern about what I’d written it would have been far more effective to ask me to take out the offending passage from the posting.

Of course I regret being fired, but I honestly believed I was telling a specialist audience of Scottish media people nothing more than they knew already about the state of property advertising. My central point was the threat to subs posed by communications technology. Little did I realise that the Express would make my prophesy come true so quickly.