In 1996 when the Scotsman was relaunched by the Barclay twins under the editorship of Andrew Neil, journalists were served with haggis canapes and champagne at a reception at the London Ritz. The first editions of the “new” paper were landed in Regent's Park by a kilted sky-diver. The Scotsman's new £20m Holyrood headquarters were opened by the Queen.
Last month, there were precious few canapes as the Scotsman was unceremoniously displaced from those headquarters by the video games company Rockstar, makers of Grand Theft Auto. There could be no more fitting metaphor for the crisis of the Scottish press as circulations dwindle, the internet steals their advertising revenue and tartanised editions of London papers invade their market share. Under its new owners, the debt-burdened Johnston Press, the Scotsman is now a newspaper of no fixed abode with a circulation of 27,000, barely a third of what it sold only a decade ago.
I work for a rival group, Herald & Times, but I indulge in no schadenfreude at the fate of the Scotsman, a paper I used to write columns for in the 1990s. Back then it was regarded in Westminster, where I then worked, as one of the best papers in the UK. In the late 1980s it had joined forces with the Guardian to defeat the old corrupt system of lobby briefings. And even today it still has some very fine writers like Joyce McMillan, its columnist and theatre critic.
The Scotsman's decline is emblematic of the crisis of the printed press in what used to be the greatest newspaper-reading nation on earth. The print newspapers have been losing 100,000 sales a year, and Charles McGee, the former editor of the Herald, has said that the Scottish print titles only have around five years left – and that was two years ago. The decline has been across the board, tabloid and broadsheet, Scottish and London-based. The Sunday Herald is the only Scottish paper to have increased its print sales significantly, largely as a result of its decision in May to back yes in the independence referendum. Since then its weekly sales have regularly been up 25% year on year.
The Scotsman, a home rule newspaper since its creation in 1817, last week decided to back no in the referendum. There was a time when this would have been a hugely significant intervention from one of Scotland's great civic institutions. However, now it is largely lost in a newspaper environment dominated by the Scottish editions of unionist titles based in London. The Scottish Daily Mail, which sells more papers than the Herald and the Scotsman combined, has been hysterically opposed to yes, running front-page splashes about intimidation and threats to English people living in Scotland. This even though the boss of the Scottish police federation, Brian Docherty, said last week that the campaign had been “robust but overwhelmingly good-natured”.
The dominance of UK titles in Scotland has made this a very difficult referendum debate for Scottish readers to follow, not least because the Scottish media are dominated by a press that to varying degrees promotes the unionist cause. As the only paper in Scotland that supports independence, the Sunday Herald sticks out on the newsstands like a sore thumb. In countries like Norway, such an unbalanced press would be regarded as unacceptable: press diversity is written into the Norwegian constitution, and was reaffirmed in 2004.
Norway suffered a similar fate to Scotland in the 1960s, with a collapse of its local titles, and it introduced a system of press subsidies in order to ensure that voters would be exposed to a full range of views and opinions. A similar system exists in Denmark – indeed most European countries subsidise the press in various ways, either through direct grants or publicly funded advertising. Even in the UK, the press used to be subsidised “below the line” from public appointments and public notices. But this source of advertising has largely dried up as recruitment has moved to the internet.
Of course, critics say the “dead tree press” only got what they deserved by allowing classified ads to depart and then posting their expensive journalism free online, allowing the likes of Google and Facebook to steal their lunch. An entire generation of newspaper consumers now expect their news to arrive for nothing. This freeconomics may make some sense for brands like the Guardian – though it has been losing tens of millions of pounds a year. It can also work for hyper-local digital news sites like the Shetland News, which has discovered a profitable business model through sponsorship and local advertising.
However, for newspapers in the middle in Scotland the future looks to be in a combination of paywalls and internet spinoffs. I again declare an interest here, but the owners of the Herald say their combination of subscriptions, online advertising and free magazines like Scottish Walks has provided a model for the future, even though sales of the group's flagship daily, the Herald, are falling. Newsquest Herald & Times actually made a profit last year of £13.8m, up 38%.
However, this has been achieved only through relentless staff cuts and a pay freeze, which have led to demoralisation and departures of key staff. In reply, the owners of the Herald say: welcome to the future. The reality is that most online ventures pay journalists next to nothing. It's just that, on the internet, no one can hear you scream.
And the impact of the referendum? Well, many believe, intuitively, that independence would be good for Scottish newspapers. There would be so much to report, apart from anything else, as Scotland sets up its own currency, negotiates entry to Europe and so on. There would likely be an economic boomlet as international companies set up local offices in an independent Scotland.
But there is no guarantee that this business would benefit the Scottish press uniquely. Eventually Scotland – in or out of the union – is going to have to find a way to prevent its domestic media being overwhelmed by the media of another country. The press reflects in microcosm the constitutional imbalances of the UK. There has been little short of fury on social media at the way the UK media have covered the independence campaign.
It may be that the long march to the internet, which everyone is forecasting, will lead to an explosion of new journalism and a proliferation of new journalistic vehicles in Scotland. Such as the Scottish Inquirer, which is being set up by a collective of Scottish freelance journalists. Journalism will always be in demand, it's getting people to pay for it that's the real challenge.
Iain Macwhirter is a Herald and Sunday Herald columnist