Online Journalism News

'The Scotsman's insanity is an industry problem'

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to be different.

If he was right then the indigenous Scottish press is stark staring hatstand.

The Scotsman has lost another editor: Mike Gilson was the ninth - and last - Scotsman editor I worked with after joining the paper in 1995.

Shuffling editors around has not improved the paper, its sales or, latterly, its advertising revenues.

Oddly, cutting costs has not had any positive effects either.

And there are daily outbreaks of Einstein's madness in newsrooms across the land as journalists in increasingly empty newsrooms slog their way through increasingly heavy workloads to produce the same old products that decreasing numbers of people are buying.

The same old, same old is not going to save journalism in Scotland, the UK, America or anywhere and this fact has some bearing on how Mike Gilson will be judged.

I like Mike but, on face value, it's hard to be positive about his record. He was parachuted in from a local newspaper in southern England by Johnston Press (the owners of The Scotsman since December 2005).

He was JP's man. Like others in that group he can be accused of not understanding The Scotsman, thinking it was the Edinburgh Morning News. The paper is demonstrably poor and, of course, sales have collapsed by an eye-watering 14,000 under his stewardship.

However, this is far from the full story. Mike had many strong points. He was an enthusiastic editor and an imaginative journalist. And, in my opinion, he was by no means the worst or even the second worst to occupy the bloodstained perch beyond the revolving doors of the editor's office.

Those sales figures cannot be laid solely at Mike's door. To support this assertion I would point to Johnston Press's impact on scotsman.com, which I edited from 2000 to 2007.

Thanks to the team I worked with, we built it up to be one of Google News's top news sources worldwide, a multi-award winner, with a tenfold increase in readership to 4 million users a month. Press Gazette in the UK was kind enough to name me one of 'the top 50 people shaping online journalism'. (Rupert Murdoch was top of the list. The then-CEO of Johnston Press was a couple of places under me.)

But then JP got rid of the team, ditched the very successful site and imposed their own cookie-cutter template, better suited to the local papers of the mid-90s than our huge international audience. Readership has halved.

My defence of Mike is based largely on this experience. As JP's short-sightedness did to the websites, so it did to the resources that the editor of the paper had at his disposal.

Finally, I understand that he was unenthusiastic about plans for merging parts of the The Scotsman's production team with the Edinburgh Evening News and Scotland On Sunday.

When you cut costs, the product is made poorer and sales fall. When sales fall, ad revenues follow the downward trajectory. Unfortunately, that process will continue under the new 'ubereditor', John McLellan.

This is no reflection on John. He's a very strong choice. A shrewd, instinctive news man, he has been at The Scotsman Publications Ltd since shortly after the invention of powered flight. He has a gut-feel for the readers and he has for a long time been the most web-friendly editor at Barclay Towers.

Also in the TSPL editorial hierarchy he has Tom Little and Ian Stewart - two talented stalwarts who (gasp) have more than a passing acquaintance with the TSPL products.

If anyone can make the combined production model work in practical terms, it's these guys. Former marine Ian Stewart's been shot at, getting subs to work an extra couple of shifts won’t be much of a trial. But in quality terms the move is a disaster. Even Citizen Kane couldn't save that situation.

Of course, compared to the carnage unleashed at the Record and Herald, the Scotsman Publications plan is a warm-hearted and visionary commitment to quality journalism.

One thing that gets forgotten in the sturm und drang is that the managers who are doing these things aren't stupid and evil (though the increasingly large numbers of journos on the dole may not agree). They are prisoners of an economic model that no longer holds. To satisfy their shareholders, Johnston Press, Newsquest and Trinity Mirror have to generate profit margins that are simply no longer sustainable. Falling ad revenues, increased online readership and plummeting sales have seen to that.

They can't increase revenues so they have to cut costs to protect the margins. But that only works in the short term; in the long term, it's the kiss of death.

The key to long-term survival for papers, Scottish and otherwise, is a commitment to quality journalism - focusing on what they do best and what their readers want – and forgetting about rewritten agency copy and lazy features. They need to understand how the web works and how to make money out of it (and they really don't at the moment).

There is a real future for print (millions of people spend money on papers and they still generate huge amounts of ad revenue). But newspapers need to radically change their print products to reflect the diversity of what the modern audience wants. The future lies in targeted, tailored print editions aimed at different parts of a paper's audience.

All that requires investment and a more modest expectation of return on that investment. For papers to survive they have to be owned by people who don't expect unrealistic profit margins - and that probably means different owners.

But before we despair we should remember that, thanks to the internet, there is a greater appetite for journalism than there has ever been. Where there is an audience that big, there is a living still to be made.

Stewart Kirkpatrick is a director of internet consultancy w00tonomy Ltd and former editor of Scotsman.com.

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