Thinkpiece
Jill Stephenson
The myth about university education
Life of George
George Chalmers
Paris daze
SR Extra
As the many young people faced with poor prospects and unemployment see where our decline into plutocracy has led them, they must be thinking that there is a better way. I doubt if our political class or the complacent super-rich, inbred and inexperienced in the realities of life in contemporary Britain can see this. How long before we see a Facebook revolt here?
An essay for the weekend by Professor Anthony Seaton
Click here
Islay’s daily pic
The butcher’s shop
Errol, Perthshire
The Cafe
Andrew Hook, in his paean to ‘The Killing’ (SR, 8 March), writes re. cults: ‘I always wonder what [people…waiting for the world to come to an end at the appointed hour] say to each other when the time has come and gone and nothing has happened.’
Sociologists might point him in the direction of ‘When Prophecy Fails’ by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter; while his former English [American] literature colleagues might point him to Alison Lurie’s ‘Imaginary Friends’.
Steve Tilley
Today’s banner
Children playing, Monifieth, Angus
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
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Leading article
Whatever happened to the
newspaper as a nation
talking to itself?
Kenneth Roy
Traditional journalists’ pub: only the journalists are missing
Photograph by Islay McLeod
Whatever happened to the newspaper as ‘a nation talking to itself’? If Arthur Miller’s definition still holds true in general terms, it no longer seems to do so in devolved Scotland.
Years later, when I had a long talk with Tony Howard, I realised that this is how it was for most young reporters. When Tony worked in the Guardian newsroom in Cross Street, Manchester, and Harry, the legendary news editor, found you with your feet on the desk, he would point to the new edition of the Oldham Chronicle, to a story headed ‘Oldest carthorse in Manchester’, and tell you to be on your way to interview the carthorse.
Well, it’s not like that any more. We don’t attempt to interview carthorses, unless they happen to be members of the actors’ union. The priorities have changed. The printed press, as well as the growing number of online papers, specialise in comment and miscellaneous punditry rather than news. Here in Scotland we have almost as many columns as Ancient Rome. I should know. I prop up one of them. It is said that this is what readers want; that news in the old sense is dead.
But is it what readers want? The first paradox of the trade – the new law of journalism – is that heavy means light; more means less. But here’s another: the relentless move towards bigger newspapers full of loose opinions and celebrity-driven piffle has been accompanied by a calamitous fall in circulations. Surprise surprise, the death of news in newspapers has not produced their hoped-for revival.
Yesterday it was announced that the chief executive of Johnston Press, the group which owns the Scotsman, was standing down. The group has had a better year financially – just as well since its loss in 2009 was a death-defying £114m. But the underlying decline of the products, as they are known, continues unarrested: advertising was down 11.4% in the first nine weeks of 2011, while the sales of the group’s daily titles fell by a further 7.3% last year. At the rival Herald group, there are rumours that the Sunday Herald, perhaps the best-written paper in Scotland, may not survive the year in its new incarnation as a ‘news magazine’.
The sad decline and fall of the traditional Scottish press, now accelerating, is no recent development. Before the Scottish Parliament was reinstated in 1999, I confidently predicted in this magazine that the heightened sense of Scottish identity, the new mood of self-determination, would lead to a burgeoning of the print media and maybe even the establishment of new titles. How wrong I was. In 1999, the first year of the parliament, the Scotsman’s daily sale was 77,000; it now stands at 43,000. In 1999, the Herald sold 106,000 copies a day; it now sells 52,000. The collapse has occurred so steadily over so long a period that, until recently, it was barely noticed. But it is a remarkable cultural phenomenon; and its impact on Scottish democracy deserves to be more closely studied.
One of the few encouraging signs in the Scottish media is the recent creation of a small community of online papers – the Caledonian Mercury, Newsnet Scotland, Bella Caledonia, SR itself. If the outmoded rivalries of the trade are put aside, and these papers act in a co-operative spirit, the online press can become an alternative force for good. But it will be a long time, if ever, before online titles take the place of the old-fashioned newspaper in the popular affection.
Whatever happened to the newspaper as ‘a nation talking to itself’? If Arthur Miller’s definition still holds true in general terms, it no longer seems to do so in devolved Scotland. Before it is too late, we ought to be asking why and what, if anything, can be done about it. Printing less chaff, and attending to such details as the proper title of the Rt Rev John Christie, would be a useful start.
Kenneth Roy is still editor of the Scottish Review
