(Monday 8 December 2008)
MALCOLM BURNS reviews the latest goings-on north of the border.On Thursday, 260 Glasgow-based journalists at The Herald group were told that they faced redundancy and would have to reapply for 220 of their jobs.
Have The Herald and its sibling titles the Sunday Herald and Glasgow's Evening Times been losing money hand over fist? Not in the least. They provided Newsquest, owned by the US Gannett corporation, with £26 million of profit in the last financial year.
It is true that, like most of the print media, they are suffering from a long slow decline in sales and a loss of advertising revenue as a result of the growth of the internet.
But Newsquest, rather than investing a good chunk of the profits generated by their talented journalists and make a transition to the digital age, has prevaricated and penny-pinched over essential new technologies, which has caused many problems. And redundancies have been the order of the day at Newsquest's Glasgow operation.
Last year, a successful one-day strike led by National Union of Journalist chapels averted compulsory redundancies. But even the voluntary redundancies have been damaging. Staff numbers have been cut by about one-third in the past four years.
The impact on the quality of The Herald in particular could be described as Metrofication. Readers of other so-called quality dailies, especially the regional press, will be familiar with this process.
Apart from the masthead and a veneer of Scottish news on the front and back pages, an increasing proportion of the content of The Herald is remarkably similar to the Metro papers you can pick up for free on your morning bus or train. It no longer has enough staff to write sufficient original stories.
Huge swathes of Scottish life, especially in politics and business, now go unreported and unscrutinised. Much of the content is simply regurgitated wire copy, mostly from PA.
Now, new Herald editor Donald Martin has claimed that the latest changes taking place are "exciting." Maybe they are if you are on the editor's salary. But the 260 journalists who are being forced to take less pay and poorer conditions, four fewer holidays a year and work new enforced shift patterns or lose their job altogether do not agree.
The big idea is "direct input" journalism, as has been so successfully implemented - irony intended - at the Express group of pornographer Richard Desmond.
But direct input by journalists is no guarantee of better quality. It's no better than blogging. It's a bit like going to the pub and pouring the beer straight from a barrel into your mouth. You might get just as drunk, but you'll probably prefer to go to a better pub.
However, the greedy owners can only see the short-term pound signs as they strip away the "costs" of production.
When Newsquest took over in 2003 from Scottish Media Group, it promised the Competition Commission that the titles would be safe in its hands and that the quality of journalism would be maintained through investment to take the papers forward.
It looks now as though what Newsquest is really about is simply pumping cash from its flagship Scottish operation across the Atlantic to the coffers of its hungry owner Gannett. At this rate, there will be no Scottish quality newspapers left in a couple of years time, an outcome which will be bad for Scottish civic life and democracy.
There has been much talk in the last couple of years of the potential of The Herald under a new owner, perhaps a trust guaranteeing editorial independence on the model of the Irish Times Trust. The Scotsman, which was reduced to a rump under the Barclay brothers and continues to languish with the current owners Johnston Press, might also benefit from a similar arrangement.
The NUJ must engage in talks with management to try to avert the current disastrous redundancy strategy at the Herald titles.
Meanwhile, on the national stage, civic and public leaders in Scotland including the NUJ and the STUC should now be galvanised into a campaign to rescue an important institution of our public life from its rapacious and destructive private owners.
I am sure that governments in both Edinburgh and London could be convinced to support such an initiative.
CONFIRMATION of Newsquest's cost-cutting strategy was provided after the BBC Trust decided to abandon plans to invest in a network of local websites. This news was greeted with relief by owners of local newspapers such as Newsquest. The Evening Times in Glasgow last week ran a special feature calling on people to get involved as "correspondents" who would report on local issues for the planned Times microsites in districts of the city. The salary for doing this work was not mentioned, mainly because it appears that there is none. You too can work for Newsquest in Glasgow - for nothing!
Nationalists' plan set for little local difficulty
IT HAS been obvious for a long time that the SNP government's plans for a local income tax have been in trouble.They deserve to be. Last week, the government suffered a 60-65 reverse in the Scottish Parliament on a Conservative motion that the local taxation Bill should allow debate on all options including a land value tax, as favoured by the Greens, and reform of the existing council tax.
While this is not the same as outright defeat for the SNP plans, it neatly demonstrates the parliamentary arithmetic which will probably scupper them.
The SNP needs to buy off the Lib Dems who do not believe that the local income tax proposed is nearly local enough. Then they need to persuade the Greens to give up the land value tax and still hope for a fair wind on the day.
I hope that the local income tax ship sinks. Whether or not you are a believer in local income tax in principle, this plan works out as little more than a cut in local government funding of several hundred million pounds.
Ironically enough, as with the unloved Scottish Futures Trust, defeat for its flagship policy has also been part of the SNP political plan. It hopes to blame Labour for voting down its "popular" and supposedly "fairer" policy rather than actually have to implement it.
But Labour is happy enough - the flawed tax plan was a vote-winner for Labour rather than the SNP in Glenrothes.
New people for new times
FULL marks to Scottish Trades Union Congress economist Stephen Boyd for nailing the first report of the government's Council of Economic Advisers led by erstwhile gnome Sir George Mathewson.Former Royal Bank boss Mathewson chairs the council whose report published last week failed to rise to the challenge of the current economic crisis.
In fact, its main recommendation was for a restructuring of Scottish university education in the future, with students presumably paying more.
"As a lesson in the banal, the report is peerless," Boyd commented. "Reflecting the long-standing prejudices of its chair, the council calls for an extension in flexible labour markets, thereby ignoring the wealth of international comparative evidence demonstrating that the UK is already very lightly regulated."
This is both a devastatingly understated critique of Alex Salmond's favourite banker and yet another reminder that the SNP government's economic policy was, until a few weeks ago, effectively that of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
We undoubtedly need some smarter, more successful Scottish thinking at the top.
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