Staffing levels have been stripped down to a bare minimum, journalists rarely get to speak to anyone face-to-face, errors such as place names, street names etc are more evidient in the papers, staff off long-term sick due to stress at work, advertising revenue falling like snow off a dyke but the most telling truth is the circulation figures – they are falling at an alarming speed, so much so that even the absent Queen Deirdre must surely take notice.

What was a good business once upon a time is being ruined by stupid decisions by a man who knows the price of everything but understands the value of nothing.

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.

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.