I have just read Arthur MacMillan’s excellent autopsy of the corpse of Scottish newspapers in the British Journalism Review. It is a forensic examination of what’s gone wrong and why there is no hope. And it rightly fingers the muppets and Johnston Press and Gannet who have brought what we laughingly call Scotland’s quality papers to their knees.
However, the article falls into the trap of by implication exonerating Andrew Neil, who is as responsible for the demise of the Hootsmon as the overpromoted local newspaper crowd. While JP has had a massively detrimental effect on the paper and the website, Neil cannot escape blame. Here’s why:
- Neil oversaw the complete alienation of the core readership in the hunt for the mythical 18-30 female Scottish Tory.
- When Neil took over TSPL, the Hootsmon sold around 80,000. When he left, it sold 55,000.
- Neil’s rule saw the departure of most of the paper’s talent, especially when the risky Business AM launched.
- Andra made a series of disastrous editorial appointments that compounded all the above and really killed the paper. (For the record, the line-up I thought would have worked best would have been Alan Ruddock as Editor with Tim Luckhurst and Martin Clarke as deputies. Clarke would have brought fire and that uncanny news sense to the party, Luckhurst would have brought brains and Ruddock would have balanced and controlled the two while providing the social face of the paper.)
This is not to excuse Tim Bowdler et al. What Neil left was not doomed. I fear the grand old paper is now though, especially since the website was killed. (By the way, the website’s success came about because we were left alone by senior management.)
2 responses so far ↓
1 Craig McGill // Sep 3, 2008 at 11:38 pm
While it’s fair enough to put some blame towards Neil - the style and stories that appeared under his stewardship seemed anything but Scotsman-esque - I think it’s harsh to point the blame for the circulation decline at him - well all of it anyway.
What I was wondering though: could a newspaper having a good website be a driving factor as well? After all, why buy the paper if it has a really good website?
(I suppose the test of that would be the papers with crap sites - their circulation would go back up as people realise online isn’t as good. Just thinking aloud…)
I think another problem for the owners of the national titles is that they are both owned by companies who have track record in local papers, not nationals.
2 rwolff // Oct 25, 2008 at 1:20 am
Arthur’s piece is bang on but lacks proximity, ironically perhaps the very element which would have precluded anyone in Scotland writing it.
I don’t much care for Andrew Neil or The Scotsman - never have - but I care deeply about journalism and its deserved seat at the table of a culturally vibrant society.
And I work at The Herald, which grants me the weight to say that its owners are clueless automatons whose interest in journalism is less than negligible.
If you ran a failing cafe, would you weaken the coffee, cut the cakes into slimmer slices, cut back on promotion, let the toilets get mankier than a tramp’s Y-fronts, ensure you had too few staff to serve your swindling customers, treat those staff like shit and mangle their pensions, quibble with your suppliers over every ha’penny, leave all but essential operational repairs unmended and demand the impossible from your senior staff in the expectation of improving business? You would if you were JP or Newsquest Herald and Times Group.
Andrew Neil and whatever role he played in the demise of The Scotsman is irrelevant. What matters now is that the two plebs in control of Scotland’s only semi-national newspapers of renown and respect are utterly disinterested in Scotland and journalism. This is a fact.
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