Celtic Quick News started in July 2004 with the specific aim of
explaining the club’s accounts. Since shortly after reaching the UEFA
Cup final a year earlier, the media had been peddling what had become
a hoary old question, ‘What happened to the Seville money?’.
What happened to the Seville money wasn’t a secret, it was explained
in the accounts published the previous August. Celtic lost millions
getting to Seville, there was no profit or surplus income, but a lack
of proper analysis of financial matters allowed some in the media to
use a successful period in the club’s history as a stick to beat it
with. I heard the question for what felt like the thousandth time on
the radio travelling home from work and got genuinely angry that
people in a position to explain Celtic’s finances were instead
creating a myth that this information was not freely available on the
Celtic web site (although seldom read).
The site started using Blogger and it’s free servers. I wrote the
first article when going through the publishing process Blogger asked
if I wanted to allow comments on the article. Comments was something
I hadn’t considered but as the default was ‘Yes’ I left it that way.
After three weeks I felt that we had covered the accounts as well as
we could and that it was probably time to end the site but by then the
comments facility had taken on a life of its own. At the time there
was a clear need for this kind of platform. One Saturday morning I
wrote a ‘Hope you enjoyed Celtic Quick News’ article, I had no
intention of running a site long term and it had become a bit of a
hassle, but instead I published a look ahead to that weekend’s game.
For a while I planned to close the site ‘in a couple of weeks’ but it
became addictive.
Nothing about Celtic Quick News was planned. Blogger was free and
suited my lack of software skills. If I was pointed towards an
alternative, which didn’t have a comments facility, I would have used
that instead. Bizarrely, it was a Rangers supporter friend who
suggested I used Blogger.
By Paul Brennan
