Newspaper editors are like football managers – Kenneth Roy

NEWSPAPER editors are like football managers – at least when it comes to the shortness of their average tenure, according to commentator, Kenneth Roy.

Writes Roy on his Scottish Review website: “Proprietors no longer invest in writer-editors; they hire editorial executives, a rather different breed, demand immediate results, which are impossible to obtain given the magnitude of the brief, and show them the door when, surprise surprise, the miracle fails to materalise.”

Roy was writing only about The Herald and The Scotsman, reflecting particularly on the late Arnold Kemp, a former editor of The Herald whose death ten years ago is being marked with the publication of a book, ‘Confusion to our Enemies: Selected Journalism of Arnold Kemp (1939-2002)’.