On Friday, journalists at the Glasgow-based Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times newspapers walked out, launching the first Scottish newspaper strike since the bitter Aberdeen Journals dispute of 1989-90. Officially, owner Newsquest's desire for compulsory redundancies provided the grounds for action, but supporters of the strike say this is a battle for the soul of The Herald and part of a larger war to stop Scotland's national media declining into parochial mediocrity.
When The Herald was launched in 1783, as the Glasgow Advertiser, founding editor John Mennons described his daily title's mission as reporting on "subjects so interesting to the nation in general and to Glasgow in particular". For most of the intervening 224 years it has done both with distinctive, sometimes acerbic, gravitas and not a little humour. Glasgow is home, but the world has been The Herald's editorial canvas.
As one of the oldest continuously published English-language newspapers (The Times was born in 1785), it has long been seen as a newspaper of record – a quality broadsheet tailored to the tastes of sophisticated, cosmopolitan Scots. Not any more. "The workforce see a vision based on driving down quality," says NUJ organiser Paul Holleran. "They believe The Herald is being changed from a national and international paper to a local rag."
Criticism is directed at News- quest, a subsidiary of US newspaper giant the Gannet Corporation, which acquired the Herald titles in 2003 for £216m. The company has trimmed £3m from the budgets of The Herald and its Sunday and evening siblings. One hundred jobs have been lost. Meanwhile, circulation of The Herald has declined from 91,000 at the time of acquisition to 71,740 in the June ABCs.
At the time of the takeover, Newsquest was greeted as a white knight. The seller, SMG, was unpopular and other interested parties included then Scotsman owners the Barclay brothers, now proprietors of the Telegraph titles. Scotland's predominantly centre-left establishment opposed Barclay ownership, alleging that the brothers' stewardship of The Scotsman proved them hostile to the Caledonian consensus.
The Barclays' vision involved combining the Scotsman and Herald groups, and their logic was impeccable. Together with its Sunday sister, Scotland on Sunday, and evening local title the Edinburgh Evening News, the Edinburgh-based Scotsman Publications is a mirror image of the Herald Group. A nation of only slightly more than five million citizens struggles to support such duplication in cities only 40 miles apart. Analysts have long promoted a merger. The added strength of combined circulation and revenue might have revived Scottish quality journalism's once virile power to compete with local editions of English titles.
But political and regulatory hostility stymied the plan and Newsquest, owner of 300 British local titles including the Bradford Telegraph and South Wales Echo, became the owner of the first national titles in its portfolio. The NUJ says the company made undertakings to the Competition Commission in 2003 about the future style and quality of The Herald and Sunday Herald. Backed by Scottish National Party MP Pete Wishart, the union recently asked the commission to reopen its inquiry into the acquisition. Last week the commission refused.
Tim Blott, Newsquest's managing director of the Herald titles, says his company has no case to answer. "On the contrary, the commission points out that no formal undertakings were given by Newsquest in relation to the acquisition." Many Scottish journalists regard that as a body blow.
"We are seeing the death of serious Scottish newspapers," says Alex Bell, director of the website AllMediaScotland.com. "The Herald and The Scotsman used to compete to be the national paper of record. They were prestigious European titles on a par with The Irish Times. Now they have become branch-line economies. They are purely profit and shareholder driven."
A recent former senior executive at The Herald says: "There is abject misery among journalists on the paper. The owners are turning it into something it never was. The Herald was never a good fit for Newsquest. It has nothing in common with its local titles. I know how shocked Newsquest executives were when they first saw the salaries earned by our correspondents. From the start of the Newsquest era, every senior Herald journalist who left was replaced by a less experienced reporter paid at least 25 per cent less – if they were replaced at all."
Another Herald veteran says: "For the first time in 200 years, Scotland does not have its own quality newspaper. Neither The Herald nor The Scotsman is a national paper these days. They are both impoverished, eviscerated shadows of their former selves."
Insiders at The Scotsman, bought from the Barclays for £160m in December 2005 by Johnston Press, say that is unfair. The NUJ's Mr Holleran admits: "Johnston Press have recently started to invest in editorial. They have hired some good reporters from other titles."
The concern among Scotland's media and political classes is that such investment is too little too late. A nation that anticipated media excellence to emerge naturally from the creation of the Scottish Parliament has been disappointed. Scottish Television has cut staff and reduced its news and current affairs output; BBC Scotland has suffered a 25 per cent reduction in the same departments. Recent investment at The Scotsman cannot disguise a circulation less than half that of the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail.
While political power has been repatriated to Edinburgh, media power is heading in the opposite direction, leaving Scotland short of the indigenous newspaper and broadcast culture required to scrutinise its infant political institutions. Journalists say that is the real backdrop to strike action in Glasgow.
Newsquest denies it emphatically. "This strike is about one compulsory redundancy," says Mr Blott. He also points out that only 26 per cent of NUJ members voted in the ballot authorising industrial action and dismisses claims that The Herald has been dumbed-down.
"The only people who have raised the question of editorial standards with me are the NUJ. We are investing in national and international journalism at The Herald and Sunday Herald. The current editor would say that The Herald is a national news- paper." That is certainly true, but he might not expect unanimous backing from his editorial team.
Tim Luckhurst is Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent
