03/08/2008

allmediascotland.com is about to change, in terms of design, functionality and style of editorial. That may lead to some disruption of normal services over the next few weeks, not least because there are holidays to be had. It does mean also the prospect of new voices, from a galaxy of bloggers. So far, Nick Clayton, David Calder, Chris Bell, Craig McGill, Paul Hineman, Shaun Milne and Mark Gorman. Here, BRIAN MCNAIR makes his allmediascotland debut. You’ll see his biog below. Feel free to become an AMS blogger yourself, by emailing us, here.


The fifth edition of News & Journalism In the UK has been put to bed. The publisher can relax, and students across the nation can celebrate with bachannalian excess at the prospect of some fresh reading material next academic year (look out for the new chapter eight especially – it’s a doody). I, meanwhile, will have more time to write the kinds of spontaneous, up-to-the-moment pieces that an online outlet like allmediascotland requires.

For my debut, in what I hope will be an ongoing contribution of news and views from the academic front line, I’d like to consider the state of the Scottish press in this grey, humid summer of 2008, fifteen years on from the original publication of N&JUK.

Everytime I revise it for a new edition, I make a point of interviewing senior editors and journalists, and this year managed to get round most of the majors. They were frank about the challenges facing their industry, most of them, and not unremittingly gloomy, but there is little doubt that we are at a turning point in the history of the Scottish press, a moment of fundamental shake-out the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations. I don’t like the word ‘crisis’, which journalists (and academics, I confess) have devalued with overuse, but for once it fits.

Scottish newspaper circulations, as we know, are down on average by a cool fifty per cent over twenty years, some by more than others. Declining circulation is a UK-wide trend, indeed global (although sales of newspapers continue to grow in the developing countries, China and India in particular).

But as former Scotsman editor, John McGurk, wrote some time ago: “It is more precipitous in Scotland where the market is crowded with sixteen morning papers crowding for attention”. The very competitiveness and diversity of the Scottish press sector, a source of pride for decades, makes it more vulnerable at a time of  upheaval in the media environment.

Scottish newspapers are faced with the same double whammy as the London-based titles – a vast, technology-driven expansion of the public sphere, and proliferation of news outlets, leading to a migration of readers away from print and towards online and mobile platforms.

There is more news around than at any time in our history, and demand is as great as it ever was. The trouble is, fewer and fewer of us want to access it through the traditional media of ink and newsprint, preferring to use personal computers and mobile devices.

This is a deep structural challenge, generational and irreversible, to which newspaper management teams have only quite recently woken up (it was only two years ago that Rupert Murdoch, once on the cutting edge of global media trends, declared the internet to be the future of journalism). 

And then there is the cyclical challenge of the economic downturn and the associated fall in advertising revenues. The oft-predicted global crisis of capitalism may indeed be upon us at last. Even if that is an exaggeration, and let’s hope it is, there are difficult times ahead, and serious financial problems for all media dependent on advertising for their income.

Riding out these twin threats will be perilous. Print media have to find a business model which allows them to make money out of their online operations sufficient to compensate for the loss of print sales. None, it is fair to say, in Scotland or the UK as a whole, has yet done so, partly because of conservative managements who don’t feel comfortable with the internet, partly because they don’t have the resources to do 'a Guardian or a Telegraph' and leap into the new era with 100 per cent enthusiasm. Even those two titles, with their whizz-bang internet operations, don’t yet make any money online.

Media organisations with deep pockets and powerful backers can afford to play the long game, building their web presence slowly and on solid foundations, investing in editorial resource as well as technology.

Others won’t have that luxury. If the economic downturn persists for years rather than months, and it may well do, declining ad revenues will see titles close, or merge, or be bought over by companies who see them as appendages to UK - or overseas-based empires.

Recent weeks and months have been peppered with news of redundancies and resignations in the Scottish press sector. There will be more, provoked by the unfolding rationalisation of the industry north of the border. At a time when we need a quality Scottish press more than ever, equipped to provide the people with serious coverage of the coming independence debate, the focus is going to be on short-term survival, and that isn’t good. 

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Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism and Communication at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of many books and essays on media-related topics, and a regular contributor to the press and broadcast media. News & Journalism In the UK will be published by Routledge in early 2009.