Death by a thousand cuts

The latest round of job cuts at The Scotsman highlights the profound crisis afflicting Scottish journalism and demands urgent action to rebuild the nation's fourth estate as mirror to itself

My journalistic alma mater, The Scotsman, lurches from crisis to crisis. Its latest editor, Neil McIntosh, resigned on August 13 after the latest round of job cuts saw key posts like the health and environment correspondents (!) made redundant.

He’s replaced by Alan Young who’ll no doubt be forced to digest yet more job cuts in the coming months, preside over the first Scottish newspaper entirely produced by generative AI and find himself replaced by an AI bot looking uncannily like David Montgomery, the paper’s ultimate owner.

The title still carries above the masthead the self-description: Scotland’s National Newspaper. A sick joke. How can a journal of national record and opinion have a business desk of one? Almost 40 years ago I was briefly the Scotsman’s London Editor when the City Office alone had four or five journalists on the staff, Westminster three and the main office half a dozen plus secretaries, a shared wire-room: two dozen or so in total. What’s more, the paper had an international reputation – and reach – I can personally verify.

Of course, print papers throughout the western hemisphere are slashing staff – or closing down. The Press Gazette calculates 293 local UK titles have closed since 2005 (and four have launched in the past two). Newsrooms in the three main local publishing groups – Newsquest, Reach and National World (The Scotsman’s owner) – employ 3000 compared with 9000 in 2007. But The Scotsman’s slash-and-burn course to cut costs and boost earnings is among the most severe.

My union, the National Union of Journalists (on whose executive I sit), says The Scotsman is heading for a “death of a thousand cuts” after 207 years. There have been 30 editors in the paper’s history – half of these in the last 30 years. Circulation was 7710 at the end of last year or a tenth of what it was when I left four decades ago; in the heyday of the devolution debates in the 1970-80s, when The Scotsman led the field, Eric Mackay and his deputy Arnold Kemp used to muse of selling 100K-plus a day.

No more a mirror

The decline of The Scotsman bodes ill for the nation it is meant to serve. Scottish journalism – supposed to reflect the richness, conflicts, achievements and failings of Scotland as a whole – is on a rocky road to ruin. This is not the fault of the journalists (though quality is often poor) but of the owners (mainly absentees) and the failure to invest. And this overall decline is part of a wider crisis afflicting our culture, notably the arts which face existential threats.

A country of which half the population wishes it were independent cannot be considered whole if its journalism – the mirror it holds up to itself – is cracked and broken. Right now, the daily menu of news and features offered by television, radio, print and new media fails too often to break new ground and prefers the auld kailyard. Here’s what my co-editor Fay Young and I wrote when we reluctantly and briefly closed down Sceptical Scot in March 2022:

“For the co-editors it is more obvious that the Scottish polity – and parts of civil society – is simply not prepared to get out of its comfort zone, rethink Scotland’s position within a rapidly changing geo-political environment, join in European and global debates on the way forward or, bluntly, abandon its parochialism and provincialism. There is simply a brick wall of often sullen incomprehension in front of us.” I wouldn’t change a word today.

Public interest journalism

My union branch, Edinburgh Freelance, chaired by the redoubtable Joyce McMillan, who has long been at the heart of Scotland’s national debate about itself, has led the way in proposing a Public Interest Journalism Institute here. We and others persuaded the Scottish Government to take the issue seriously and set up a working party to consider how best to proceed. But, like so much touched by Holyrood inertia, it remains an idea only years later.

Thankfully, there are new, online titles springing up like the Edinburgh Inquirer or the Community Newsroom launched by Greater Govanhill and the Ferret but Scotland needs a much richer variety of offerings – and not just locally but nationally and, yes, internationally if it to punch above its weight, Irish-style, in the arts and media, let alone economically and politically.

In a period when more journalists are being killed (notably in Gaza) and/or imprisoned than ever before in the world, we need in our small corner of the world ministers, politicians and others to stand up for independent, original journalism – and to invest in it. Death by a thousand cuts would shrink the nation and its society as a whole.