Maybe Andrew Neil wasn’t so daft after all.
In 2002, the man known to readers of Private Eye as “Brillo pad” hatched a plan to merge The Scotsman, of which he was then the editor-in-chief and publisher, with The Herald.
Neil persuaded The Scotsman’s then owners, Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, that they should splash out in excess of £200 million for SMG Publishing, the owners of newspapers the Herald, Sunday Herald, and Evening Times as well as a host of specialist magazines including Scottish Farmer, The Great Outdoors (TGO), Boxing News and The Strad, which the troubled SMG PLC had put up for sale.
At the time, the idea the Neil and the Barclay brothers should buy SMG Publishing was widely derided by journalists and politicians, partly because of Neil’s unfortunate reputation in Scotland, and also because it was seen as anti-competitive. Andrew Jaspan, the former editor of the Sunday Herald who relocated to Scotland in 1988 at Neil’s behest to launch The Sunday Times Scotland, led a highly effective campaign to stop it in its tracks.
Herald and Sunday Herald journalists, and many others in Scotland and further afield, feared that the plan would: (1) Lead to massive job losses; (2) Damage media diversity in Scotland; (3) Enable Neil to foist his brand of anti-Holyrood, pro-Union, free-market, neo-Thatcherite rhetoric onto the Glasgow/merged newspapers, which would have run counter to their liberal and vaguely pro devolution and pro nationalist ethos; (4) Have disastrous consequences both for internal morale and, more importantly, for sales (something similar happened at The Scotsman during Neil’s stewardship of that newspaper); (5) Lead to the closure of the Sunday Herald, then a mere three year old.
Scottish newspapers in peril
In the end, the suits at SMG PLC (known as Scottish Media Group in 1997-2000 and before that as Scottish Television PLC) plumped for a £216m offer from McLean, Virginia-based Gannett, a publishing empire that was desperate to do a UK regional deal at the time. The gossip was that, even though the Barclay brothers had offered an even fuller price than Gannett, SMG’s board chose to go with the more anodyne US option for fear of a media/political/Competition Commission backlash in Scotland.
Wind the clock forward six years and Neil’s plan doesn’t seem as hare-brained as it did at the time (especially to employees of the Sunday Herald!)
A BBC Scotland “investigation” has this morning confirmed that the majority of Scottish quality newspapers are “wilting” in the face of an onslaught from the “tartan editions” of London titles such as The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and Sun. Their circulations are mainly down by 40% to 50% over past eight years.
The programme, intriguingly made by Andrew Neil’s former henchman John McGurk, was aired at 9am this morning, just an hour or two after it emerged that Scotland’s local authorities have decided to cease placing recruitment advertisements in the pages of the Herald, Scotsman, Courier and Press & Journal from the end of May. Instead, Scotland’s cooncils intend to use a customised online strategy.
This is a serious blow for Scotland’s “quality” newspapers and their Sunday and evening stablemates, which derive an estimated 70% of their recruitment advertising revenues from public sector clients.
This morning’s BBC Radio Scotland programme included comments from the US academic Professor Phillip Meyer, who suggested that, if current trends continue, Scotland’s quality newspapers are likely to become extinct in 2018. Meyer, the Knight chair of journalism at the University of North Carolina, was quoted as saying: “If you take the rate of decline and extend it to the zero point, I would say the end of Scottish newspapers as we know them within ten years will probably happen unless there are some surprises.”
In his 2005 book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, Prof Meyer estimated that printed newspapers will have died by 2043 in the United States.
If Meyer’s prediction for Scottish newspapers’ earlier demise is true — and I sincerely hope it isn’t! — then Andrew Neil’s plan probably deserves to be re-visited. Had the scheme been hatched by more enlightened owners than the Torygraph-owning, tax-exile twins, and had it been proposed by someone with greater political nouse and fewer chips than Neil, it might have worked. Who knows, even now it might still be the the best hope for Scotland’s quality press.
To read the BBC Scotland report on the plight of Scotland’s indigenous newspapers click here.
This blog post was published on 16 May 2008