A former executive editor at The Herald newspaper has announced he is to stop supplying content to the paper, because of the terms and conditions it is expecting freelance contributors to agree to as a prerequesite to being commissioned.

Gordon Mack took voluntary redundancy as a senior staffer at The Herald two years ago. As well as having been an executive editor (production), he had also been digital media editor at the paper. But he didn't entirely stop contributing, becoming The Herald's angling correspondent, following his setting up of LongLine Media (www.longlinemedia.co.uk), a specialist agency offering news and PR services to the angling sector.

But he has declined to sign a new freelance agreement being proposed by The Herald and sister titles, the Sunday Herald and the Evening Times.

His main complaint concerns the rates being offered in return for the cross-title, multimedia and third-party publishing rights which The Herald publishers, Newquest, wants.

Mack told allmediascotland.com: “I was not prepared to accept the standard terms offered by Newsquest and they were not prepared to negotiate what I consider realistic terms for my work. 
 
“I am disappointed that my 29-year association with the paper is at an end, but I am more saddened that a still-profitable company seems to believe its future financial success has to include squeezing its contributors out of every last drop of recompense. Its freelance rates are simply unrealistic in the multimedia market.
 
“Frankly, the salmon in our rivers stand a better chance of survival, than freelances working for Newsquest.”

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