UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 401-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

SCOTTISH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

Crisis in the Scottish press industry

Tuesday 31 March 2009

MR STEPHEN BOYD and MR PAUL HOLLERAN

PROFESSOR NEIL BLAIN and MR MARTIN BOYLE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 71

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Scottish Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 31 March 2009

Members present

Mr Mohammad Sarwar, in the Chair

Mr Jim McGovern

David Mundell

Mr Charles Walker

Mr Ben Wallace

Pete Wishart

________________

Witnesses: Mr Stephen Boyd, Assistant Secretary, Scottish Trades Union Congress, and Mr Paul Holleran, National Union of Journalists, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: I would like to welcome our witnesses to this meeting. Would you please introduce yourselves for the record?

Mr Boyd: I am Stephen Boyd, Assistant Secretary with the Scottish Trades Union Congress. My main responsibilities are economic and industrial policy.

Mr Holleran: I am Paul Holleran, the Scottish Organiser for the National Union of Journalists.

Q2 Chairman: Before we start with detailed questions, would you like to make any opening remarks?

Mr Boyd: We very much welcome this opportunity to provide evidence to the Committee today. Obviously the STUC is very concerned about the press industry in Scotland. It is an industry that is currently characterised by rapidly diminishing employment prospects for our members by serious health and safety issues in the workplace, by inadequate investment in training, by a succession of poor strategic decisions by management, a deteriorating industrial relations environment, unfortunately, and the lack of capacity is a concern because of diminishing employment prospects for our members, but perhaps even more importantly it undermines, we believe, democracy in Scotland. At the moment coverage of political, economic and social affairs in Scotland is totally inadequate and it is a situation that we would like to see addressed and addressed very soon.

Mr Holleran: I am content with Steve's statement.

Q3 Chairman: In the Scottish press industry how many jobs were lost last year?

Mr Holleran: Journalistically about 250 last year and this year there have been a further 190 so far since January.

Q4 Chairman: There have been more job losses in Scotland in the last three months than for the whole of last year?

Mr Holleran: Yes.

Q5 Chairman: What is the reason for that?

Mr Holleran: Some people might suggest that some of the employers or publishers are jumping on the bandwagon in respect of the financial crisis and taking advantage of opportunities to make people redundant. There is no doubt that there has been a massive downturn in advertising revenues and also falling circulations. The BBC has brought forward job cuts as well. They have front-loaded on their job cuts. Those are the two main areas that have impacted.

Q6 Chairman: Is the pattern of job losses the same between Scottish national papers and Scottish regional papers?

Mr Holleran: No. Scottish national papers have been far more badly affected. The regional papers seem to be managing things in a far more constructive way. For the Daily Record and Sunday Mail there is a threat to a quarter of the editorial workforce at the moment. The Herald/Evening Times and Sunday Herald have just lost in the region of 40 journalists this year.

Q7 Mr Walker: Out of interest on the national side of this what sort of pay scale is a journalist on? I think there is a misconception that all journalists are earning hundreds of thousands but they are not at all. What is the pay breakdown of a five or six year journalist on a national?

Mr Holleran: At the moment the starting rate for reporters in The Herald/Evening Times, Sunday Herald, Daily Record and Sunday Mail is £25,000. That is once you have qualified, so three years into the job you would move onto a pay bracket starting at about £25,000.

Q8 Mr Walker: The redundancies are going up right through the scale. Are they trying to get rid of their highest earners or are they spread across the earnings scale?

Mr Holleran: That is a very important point. In recent years there has been a recognition within the industry that where there is a need to make cuts then there is almost a mutually beneficial approach to redundancies where people who are near the end of their working career, maybe a couple of years away from retirement, and also at the higher end of the pay scale, would volunteer to go early and we would negotiate reasonable redundancy packages and access early pensions for these people. It is almost like a natural progression and new blood would come in. What is happening this year, which is quite alarming, is that companies appear to be targeting shorter term staff, people who have only been there five to seven years and are at the lower end of the pay scale because it is not as expensive for them to make those redundancies happen. They are getting the numbers down but it is not costing them anywhere near as much. I think that is hand-in-hand with the current financial situation. That is what is causing more alarm than anything else, certainly amongst my members where younger people are being targeted.

Q9 Chairman: How many job losses have there been in Scottish regional papers?

Mr Holleran: It is difficult to say but probably only about 30.

Q10 Chairman: Is that in the last three months?

Mr Holleran: From October until now there have probably been 30 job losses in the regional weekly papers.

Q11 David Mundell: Firstly, on this issue of the seven-day title, because that seems to be a concept that is emerging, where the groups, rather than having the daily paper and the Sunday paper, that effectively a seven-day operation simply produces effectively the one product, although it may be branded slightly differently at the weekend. Is that a correct summary?

Mr Holleran: Can I give you the long answer to that. Last year, as the number of redundancies rose, it became apparent to union officials that there were rising incidences of stress and mental health problems amongst our members, more long-term illnesses. We carried out a health and safety survey in each of the national titles and the BBC based on the Health and Safety Executive's management standards of stress, and the results were quite horrendous. The Health and Safety officials that we dealt with said that they were amongst the worst that they had ever seen. Each of the employers acknowledged how bad those results were and they acknowledged that the only way they were producing papers at that particular time was through the goodwill of the workforce, people working long hours, not taking breaks, not taking sufficient dinner breaks in some cases, and working extra shifts all through their own goodwill. What has happened since then is that while we have been trying to address that issue they have made more redundancies and they have brought in new production systems or, in the Daily Record and Sunday Mail's case are aiming to bring in a new production system with 70 journalists fewer before it is even brought in. They obviously look at the contradiction where there are not enough people now to produce newspapers. People are not getting breaks. They then try and bring in new systems which are more efficient, and so far those efficiencies have not shown up; they have actually been problematic, but they then proceed to make more job cuts. The only way that they can then restructure that and manage it is by the seven-day operation and having people working far more unsociable hours. The Scotsman publications at the moment and the Daily Record and The Herald/ Evening Times are all looking at similar models and their proposals are quite unacceptable to most of my members who believe that the hours that they are being asked to work are not just unsociable but are not family friendly, and quite probably will be damaging to their health, so there is major concern.

Q12 David Mundell: Am I right in thinking that at the moment or in the immediate past an entirely separate group of your members produced, say, The Scotsman to the Evening News to Scotland on Sunday?

Mr Holleran: Yes.

Q13 David Mundell: But the model that it is moving towards is a single group of people would produce all three. Is that right?

Mr Holleran: That is correct. I suppose there are two concerns that we have more than anything. One is in respect of the redundancies and the people who remain trying to cope with the increased workload, but secondly the whole concept of introducing seven-day working where the same sub-editors who would be used to doing the Evening News in Edinburgh were then expected to work late shifts to produce The Scotsman and at the weekend produce Scotland on Sunday as well. These three papers have their own political identity, their own feel, and the readership have an understanding of what those papers stand for, and having one group of sub-editors or picture desk editors producing those papers will damage those identities. Exactly the same goes for the Daily Record and Sunday Mail. It is a major concern to us. We have reports at the moment from The Herald/Evening Times and Sunday Herald, who are maybe six months ahead of the other two groups with their experiment which they say is very exciting and compelling, but already the reporters who previously worked for the Evening Times are being asked to give up their lunch breaks so that they can merge with The Herald reporters to work across the titles. We are seeing a diminution of quality and of their ability to do a proper job.

Q14 David Mundell: Is this entirely a Scottish phenomenon? If we were currently interviewing your equivalent from, say, Liverpool - I am not familiar enough with the titles - or other major cities in England?

Mr Holleran: A similar approach was taken by Trinity Mirror at Birmingham where they merged Birmingham and Coventry titles and put them into a new production system. That was in the summer of last year.

Q15 David Mundell: Overall is Scotland losing jobs in the same proportion as the rest of the UK industry?

Mr Holleran: Proportionally it seems to be much higher.

Q16 David Mundell: Is there any explanation for why that would be the case?

Mr Holleran: One of the discussions I have with the managing directors in Scotland is that they believe that the English-based titles that have Scottish editions are in a stronger position. With The Express, for example, they would have substantially fewer journalists than the Scottish office. The Sunday Times would be the same or The Times would be the same. The Daily Mail would have much more staff. They have an English base of a newspaper with Scottish pages, so there is a competition element. The cut-price sale of the Daily Star and The Sun has obviously added to some of the difficulties. There is a problem across the whole industry, there is no doubt about that, but at the moment the Scottish titles seem to be trying to use the same template to find a solution.

Q17 David Mundell: In terms of overall job losses, what is the number in terms of the back office and the people who are not frontline journalists? Do you have that information?

Mr Holleran: I think over the last five years since some of the newspaper groups consolidated, there has been a cutting to the bone of admin workers and of advertising staff. I think it has been part of a consolidation. Where groups like Johnston Press or Trinity have taken on other titles, they then reduce the amount of back-up staff or close printers down, for example. That has been happening for the last five or six years. The editorial has by and large been protected to a certain degree and that has now been changed quite dramatically.

Q18 David Mundell: That is why effectively the proportion of people going are more journalistic than backroom?

Mr Holleran: Yes.

Q19 David Mundell: In terms of the content of the titles for us as potential readers of the titles, what difference are we going to notice in the new situation?

Mr Holleran: In the last five years there have been a number of decisions that have been made that have impacted on the quality of the newspapers in Scotland. I am thinking back to a number of editorial appointments where editors who maybe originated from south of the Watford gap were put in charge of national newspapers in Scotland without knowing their new patch and I think that has impacted on the cultural and the understanding of what Scottish newspapers should be. That was a bad starting point. They are now trying to regain that momentum where they are reflecting what goes on in Scotland in the community. However, during that period, the profitability of these titles has gone up has gone up quite dramatically. To give an example, when The Herald was owned by the Scottish Media Group their last two years of profits were £12 million and £9 million. Newsquest's profits in the last two years have been in the region of £21-24 million. They have made massive profits during that period in the last four or five years and they have done that also by making cuts. Amongst those cuts they have closed down a number of correspondents like the coverage of the European Parliament, for example; they have closed their Brussels office, their Strasbourg office, they have reduced correspondents in a number of areas, they have reduced the number of columnists, so there is less diversity. I think that is part of the problem with the fall in circulation.

Q20 Chairman: The decision of the management at Trinity Mirror Plc, which is seeking to merge the newsrooms at the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, with the potential of 70 job losses, and the alternative proposals from the NUJ calling for a reduction of around 50 jobs; what are the chances of success in the negotiations?

Mr Holleran: Unfortunately the negotiations seem to have ground to a halt. There is a strike on Saturday. The Daily Record and Sunday Mail will be striking on Saturday because the management are moving towards a selection process to handpick people to make up the figure to 70. At the moment we have around 40 volunteers who are prepared to leave as soon as possible, and we have got agreement from those who remain to work on a flexible approach and to adopt a new system going in and then review what efficiencies are made by the new system. Over the years we have seen changes in technology and certainly the union has played a major role in those changes as one of the biggest training providers. We do not stand in the way of technology but what we think makes sense is bringing new technology in, seeing what efficiencies it makes, and if there were certain jobs that are displaced by that technology we would then negotiate redundancies on that basis. It seems crazy to us to get rid of a quarter of the editorial workforce and then bring in a system that they do not even know is going to work. The BBC did it and it never worked; The Herald has done it and it has not worked. There are major technical difficulties two years on at both these organisations and you would have thought that the Daily Record's executive management would have learnt from the mistakes of the BBC and Newsquest.

Q21 Chairman: You are saying that around 40 people are willing to leave voluntarily?

Mr Holleran: Yes.

Q22 Chairman: The management cannot see any sense in this which can avoid the compulsory redundancies and keep the staff happy as well.

Mr Holleran: We cannot see the logic in what they are proposing.

Q23 Pete Wishart: Can I explore with you what sort of discussions you have had with management given that we have a strike on Saturday. I am supposing your answer is that they were not very fruitful and productive discussions in consultation. What is the stake at issue between the unions and the management in these titles just now?

Mr Holleran: I have got to say that the consultation negotiation has been far more extensive than it was with Newsquest. Both The Scotsman management and the Daily Record management have sat round the table and tried to consult and look at the whole project and work with us very closely in trying to go forward. We have engaged with senior editorial management as well, not just the managing director and head of human resources, but also with the senior editorial management, the people with responsibility for designing the system and ensuring its smooth introduction. Without wanting to get any of them in trouble, they totally agree with our strategy and do not see how the system can be brought in with that many fewer journalists. Whether there is a dictat from Trinity Mirror in London that these figures must be met, we can only surmise that that is the situation. I get on very well with the managing director at The Record. He has just recently taken on responsibility for all of Trinity daily titles across the whole of the UK. I do not know whether Mark is trying to make a name for himself by being bullish, but it does not seem to be very logical. We have had very few strikes in Scotland compared to England. I have been doing this job for 17 years and we have had something like five or six days' strike in that period as opposed to hundreds - maybe 150, 160 - in the last two years in England. We have quite a different industrial relations approach and no-one can accuse us of wanting to just hit the streets for any excuse - we have bent over backwards to avoid it - and we pride ourselves on being able to negotiate constructive moves, taking things forward, but this just seems to be hitting a brick wall.

Q24 Pete Wishart: Do you find that the management are equally prepared to discuss constructively and sensibly with you about some of these issues? You raised Newsquest and what happened with other titles where all the staff were effectively sacked and asked to reapply for their jobs with worse terms and conditions. What part of the negotiation did you have with that? Were you consulted that it was going to be happening there?

Mr Holleran: None whatsoever. All the staff were called into a massive room and an announcement was made. The editor-in-chief, Donald Martin, just said that they had all been made redundant and that 250 of them had to apply for 210 jobs with worse conditions. I think someone pointed out to him that he actually could not do that under the law, and I think that is part of the problem with a lot of newspaper employers, that they think they are beyond the law. However, we have tried to then influence that by going in and speaking to the managing director and we have successfully persuaded him to accept volunteers as opposed to the previous position of just handpicking people who would not be coming back in. That has obviously brought some relief to the people who are working there. The hours that people are working now under the new contract are quite horrendous. There have been pay cuts, there have been people being told they have to work through their lunches. One guy was suspended last week for refusing to carry a video camera and he had not had any training in health and safety. It is deteriorating actually so we are really concerned about what is going on there with the people who remain.

Q25 Pete Wishart: Management say that this is all necessary because of falling sales and we are into a new generation of the way the media is being reported. At the same time it strikes me that you are losing your quality editorial and key journalists who have a massive track record in covering Scottish politics and Scottish life. It would seem that losing them and having new people employed who really do not know the situation is not really going to address falling sales. Do you have a view about that with the way that you are actually going around trying to amalgamate and create these new posts under different conditions and losing key members of staff? How is it possible to enable titles on the basis of that approach?

Mr Holleran: It is very difficult. At one end of the spectrum we have very experienced journalists who have left, and specialists, not just writers but sub-editors, people who know what is right and wrong legally but also factually. If someone on the business desk has written something that they know not to be accurate they can then make those adjustments. There has been a massive reduction in that level of skill and experience, which is of great concern to us and should be to the company as well. As David asked before about the seven-day merger, they believe that the individuals who are left will be able to provide that kind of cover. We do not see that.

Q26 Pete Wishart: We all know the political journalists. We work with these people day in and day out. I do not think I have ever known a period where the morale amongst our colleagues in the press is so low. In fact, there is also some anecdotal evidence emerging where communication officers at local authorities, for example, cannot believe the calibre of candidates coming forward, people with years and years of journalistic experience. What is morale like? What opportunities are presented to your members if they are in the unfortunate position of losing their jobs? How are they coping with the current conditions just now?

Mr Holleran: They are not coping. I carried out a surgery the week before last and from nine o'clock in the morning until a quarter past six there were people coming in all day complaining about the new contracts or the new working conditions or the pressures that they were being put under. I was getting reports about senior people being in tears in The Herald. It is quite astonishing actually. It is not astonishing if you look at what happened. I suppose what epitomises the levels of loss in morale was when I met with the managing director of Newsquest after he made the announcement. They clearly had a figure that they had to arrive at of savings and said that they wanted between 30 and 40 journalists to go, and there were 51 volunteers. That tells you the level of morale.

Q27 Chairman: While obviously the morale of the staff is low, I have spoken to a number of people associated within the press - and we have a session on 6 May where John McClelland, editor of The Scotsman, and Mark Hollinshead, managing director of Trinity Mirror, and Donald Martin, editor-in-chief Glasgow Herald and Sunday Herald will appear before this Committee - if you can give them one piece of advice, what would that be?

Mr Holleran: It is very difficult. John McClelland and Donald Martin have clearly been given targets to meet in respect to the amount of savings that they have to find. The difference is Donald believes he can make it work; I am not sure if John believes the level of cuts will allow him to make the new set-up at The Scotsman work. There is a lot of concern about how they, as editors-in-chief, make the new system work. I would say to Mark Hollinshead we have put a compromise on the table that we think will allow us to try and work in partnership in future to try and get back to a more civilised industrial relations position.

Q28 Chairman: Stephen, do you have anything to add to this?

Mr Boyd: I do not have anything to add in terms of advice. The point should be made very strongly to all three, going back to the points I made at the start, the press industry in Scotland is not currently reflecting the major economic and social issues. We are particularly interested in Scottish democracy, and clearly we have the National Conversation, we have got the Calman Commission, and these are really important issues for Scotland moving forward, and public debate as reflected in the newspapers is completely inadequate in reflecting the extent of the issues being addressed as part of that debate and the depth of the issues and really trying to illuminate the public as to the key issues that are facing Scotland moving forward. You only have to look at some of our key titles and Paul has spoken about them in response to David's question about the seven-day titles. The thought that at this moment in time we might lose one of our major Sunday titles, for instance, is very, very worrying to us. That is one out of a very shallow pool company of titles that are addressing the major issues in Scotland in any sort of depth at all. I think they have to be aware of their civic duties here as well as their duties as newspaper editors because they are clearly pivotal at this moment in time.

Q29 Mr Walker: Do you not get into a vicious cycle if you run a newspaper? A lot of people buy newspapers because they like the journalist and they like the depth of the research and the stories that that produces, and when you have fewer journalists producing more copy you get a deterioration in the standards which means you get fewer people willing to part with 50p a day or 90p a day to buy a newspaper. I do not see what the answer to that is in the current approach being taken by the proprietors. Are we just going to have newspapers full of basically regurgitated press releases sent into the remaining six journalists manning the office? Is that not a danger?

Mr Holleran: That is one avenue that certain proprietors want to go down. If I can just read something else to you and this is from the Gannett website. Gannett are the owners of Newsquest who own the Herald, Sunday Herald/Evening Times. They were announcing last year that they will start crowd sourcing, which means that they will put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large investigative features. "Crowd sourcing involves taking functions traditionally performed by employees, ie journalists, and using the internet to outsource them, generally to a large group of people. The compensation is usually far less than what an employee might make for performing the same service." To me that is frightening. That means this group of newspapers are saying to the readers: you give us the news, we will put it straight onto the web.

Q30 Mr Walker: There is a growing view amongst people who are looking at this amongst academics that actually blogs and this type of reporting is not news; it is just a stream of conscience and actually journalism is a profession and good journalists, as we used to have and still do, make their name through the depth of their research and their tenacious pursuing of a story. Stephen, you said that you were concerned about the impact this may have on democracy. Unless journalists are questioning what is coming across their desk then I think you have some very real concerns as to what appears in your newspapers and what informs people's thinking.

Mr Boyd: Absolutely. I do find the statement that Paul has just read out quite terrifying. Where is the quality control? Who analyses this stuff when it comes through? Who filters it for public consumption? It is not immediately clear to me that the capacity will be there to do that. Paul will tell me if I am wrong, but I think the recent record of the Scottish titles in investigating in the new media approach is pretty poor. If you look at what The Herald and Scotsman papers have done in terms of their blog and compare it to some of the better titles like the Guardian's blog pages, it is clear that these have not been effectively moderated. We are trying to extend the quality of that website from no investment at all, and I think it reflects very poorly on the findings. You cannot have it all ways. They either want to invest properly in these new methods or they do not. They cannot just expect people to fill this gap in the quality control.

Mr Holleran: The alternative route to the one I have suggested there and the one that you have raised is one that you would compare, say, the likes of the Irish Times, for example, which is operated under a trust ownership and has certain standards and has certain criteria for investment and coverage of news items and current affairs. They have to reach certain standards and they are covered by those trust deeds and the money that is generated. Obviously there is an element of returns that can then be redistributed back into that organisation. I think that would be what we really believe is the way forward in Scotland. I have a genuine concern as to the future of a number of titles in Scotland over the next two years and I really do think that the Government needs to look at engaging very, very closely with the industry to be in a position to step in at the right time if one of those titles is under serious threat as we believe may happen within the immediate future.

Q31 David Mundell: Are the Scottish editions of the London titles, in your view, a positive factor in the Scottish market or have they contributed to this situation?

Mr Holleran: I suppose they have contributed to a degree. If you look at the quality of the Times, for example, of the Telegraph, where they have a large group of journalists based in England producing the core of the paper and then a handful of journalists in Scotland -- more than a handful in some cases but certainly not comparable with the Scottish national titles - who then contribute an element of Scottish sport and news. People then find that attractive to buy because there is far more news and far more substance to it. There is a competition element to that that certainly the employers would have a view on in respect of the negative impact of the Scottish titles that are based in England.

Q32 Mr McGovern: At the risk of sounding slightly parochial, I am the Member of Parliament for Dundee West. I am sure that you will be aware that the press in Dundee is DC Thomson and their attitude towards unions. However, on the other side of that coin it is my understanding that very few people employed by DC Thomson ever leave and there are no compulsory redundancies and usually they give fairly well advanced severance packages, whether it is early retirement or voluntary redundancy. Given this Government's commitment in the first couple of years that they were in power to trade union recognition and the right to representation, could you tell me how hard the NUJ have worked to try and get recognition in DC Thomson?

Mr Holleran: Quite hard for a number of years. Part of our difficulty has been that in the last five or six years where a number of changes have taken place, such as a new editor has been brought in from London titles or new owners like Newsquest, there has been a downturn in conditions and the way management has been behaving in these other titles, whereas DC Thomson appear to have stood still and there has been no deterioration. I am not being mealy-mouthed, we have very few problems. We have members in Dundee and in Aberdeen and in the Sunday Post, and very occasionally I will get a phone call from a member with personal difficulties. We do not have the same industrial relations problems there as anywhere else. It is quite interesting that their approach to news is the same. It is done in a constructive way with the community and reflects what goes in the communities. I would say that their model does not seem to be too bad a model.

Q33 Mr McGovern: I have heard that if your organisation negotiates, for example, a three per cent pay rise across the board for your membership, DC Thomson offers something like 3.25 per cent to make sure people do not bother joining a union. Is that fairly accurate?

Mr Holleran: I believe so.

Q34 Mr Wallace: I had better declare that my father worked for DC Thomson in the 1960s. I think one of its contributions is a successful title and I think both its acquisition of Press and Journal and DC Thomson The Courier you have to say that with regard to the other titles in Scotland it is doing okay and it is holding its own against the dropping advertising revenue and competitive Scottish editions of English papers. Do you think there is something that could be learned from The Herald and The Record in that? What is it that makes those two publications successful? As a Conservative it is tempting for me to say it is because they have not had the unions, but that is probably not true and it is flippant, but what is it that is good about the model that keeps that balance going?

Mr Holleran: Stability, for one. There is also a lack of ambition to be caught up in the ongoing battle to be the number one newspaper group in the UK where Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press and Newsquest and Associated Newspapers have all been struggling to become the largest newspaper group and to take over smaller titles and to acquire and expand. That has got out of hand somewhat in recent years to the extent that there has been a lack of due diligence in some areas when titles have been brought over. I can think of Johnston Press buying all the titles in Ireland and Associated buying other titles and then realising that they are just black holes and they are not actually generating the revenue that they thought they were and the expansion now needs to stop and they are all now trying to sell and there are titles being closed - Trinity closed titles - titles being sold off or being put up for sale. Those groups also were chasing returns on their investment in the region of up to between 30-40 per cent. My understanding is that DC Thomson had much less ambitious financial returns when they were setting targets. That greed, as it were, being put into play has changed the way management has treated newspapers in recent years in these newspaper groups and that is where all the conflict has come from. That is why we are now seeing the deterioration in journalism and now as the financial crisis kicks in there is a lack of substance there. There are less good journalists, there are no strategic approaches other than to try and push things into merged titles and converge with the internet, but you need to be able to invest in that and you need to do it in a strategic approach to offer, as Charles said, a quality journalism that is going to attract people and attract advertisers. I think that is the difference. There has been stability with DC Thomson that has not existed with these other groups as they have clamoured for bigger and better things.

Q35 Mr Wallace: What strikes me with DC Thomson is that you have good editorial but also good management, including the family that is involved in it. It is a good solid management.

Mr Boyd: It is local management.

Q36 Mr Wallace: Do you find that across the other titles the management is not very good quality on average and that you have got a few who are exceptional or you have editors who are suddenly having to be group managers as well as editors and that is part of the problem?

Mr Holleran: I would say it is one of the biggest problems I have had to face in the 15/16 years that I have been doing this job is poor management, either through lack of training or just people who maybe appear to be good journalists or editors who are promoted but not given any management training and that has been a big problem.

Q37 Mr Wallace: On the matter of the revenue squeeze, how many local authority free giveaway newspapers in Scotland are funded by advertising or show any advertising? I now represent a seat in Lancaster but I used to be in Aberdeenshire. Some counties in England have been stealing revenue from advertisers but they have been putting out their council free sheet funded by advertisers.

Mr Holleran: I do not think that is the problem. I think one of the problems is the threat of falling advertising revenues or the removal of advertising revenues from government advertising in the papers. I think that is something that certainly some of your colleagues in Westminster have certainly been lobbied on and at Holyrood. So the removal of advertising revenues by local authorities and by central government to their own web portals is a major concern across the industry. That is just part of a number of areas of concern. I am not scaremongering here but I think there are major fundamental concerns that we have as to the future of some of the titles and I think something more drastic needs to be put in place to protect the future of some newspapers.

Q38 Pete Wishart: Whatever the reason for Aberdeen's success of DC Thomson and The Courier, and also to a certain degree the Press and Journal, they are able to locally editionalise. If you move through a large constituency in Perthshire you would find a different billboard representing a news story from that community for four or five miles. There are rumours, and I do not know if you have any views on this and whether you can tell this Committee, that DC Thomson are considering buying The Scotsman if Johnston Press fail there. Is that something you would welcome given the way that PDM have actually engaged themselves as a management or do you know any more in this connection to be a realistic quote?

Mr Holleran: I was hoping you were not going to ask me that question. Singing the praises of DC Thomson will put me in a really difficult position. However, if I am being honest, certainly lots of people's views in Scots publications on the editorial side amongst my members is that that would not be an altogether bad thing in the sense that many years ago Johnston Press were seen as a real organisation, a family-driven organisation that was newspapers through and through. Most people believe that they have lost that now in the clamour for bigger profits and expansion and that while they still make the right noises about editorial quality, they are finding it difficult to deliver because of those financial constraints. A DC Thomson takeover will probably be welcomed by a lot of people in Scots publications at the moment.

Q39 Mr McGovern: I was just reminded there that at the end of my previous question about DC Thomson and their engagement or non-engagement of trade unions, I was once told, and I am not sure if this is an urban myth or not, that Winston Churchill, who was MP for Dundee from 1908-1922, when he lost his seat he made a particularly disparaging speech about Dundee and DC Thomson refused ever to publish his name in their papers again. During the Second World War they would only refer to him as "the Prime Minister" and would not publish his name. I feel the same fate might now befall me. Perhaps I should echo Ben's comments that they have got a great staff and good management. The question is which Scottish regional newspaper jobs have been or will be relocated?

Mr Holleran: What do you mean "relocated"?

Q40 Mr McGovern: Going back to the DC Thomson analogy, and this is being covered in the next question at the same time, it is my understanding that DC Thomson, and people have referred to this, that while the printing is done in Dundee they have satellite offices in Fife, Perth and Forfar, various locations, and they just send stories in. If that would apply on a national basis, speaking about The Sun, The Star, The Record or The Times, if there are job losses of the Scottish journalists who are facing losing their jobs are being offered relocation and, if so, how many?

Mr Holleran: There does not appear to be any threat to district offices at the moment. Certainly The Record are not suggesting closing the Aberdeen office or reducing any of their staff in Edinburgh or Inverness. At the moment we are not really seeing that. The Herald is maintaining their presence in the Highlands as well. I do not really see that as a major issue at the moment but it may change.

Q41 Mr McGovern: Do you have a view on which facilities could be transferred out of the region which is served by certain publications and which are important to remain within that region?

Mr Holleran: That is a bit of an issue for some of the regional papers, some of the smaller weekly titles at the moment, like the Clyde & Forth Group, for example, who own Dunfermline Press, have started moving. It is a pity that Katy Clark is not here because it affects her local paper. A lot of their papers in Ayrshire have all been moved into one office in Ardrossan. So papers from Largs and Millport, from Ayr, from Irvine, they have all been put into Ardrossan and more people are working from there. We have not lost any jobs. There have been no editorial jobs lost there other than secretarial and admin staff. The company say we do not want to lose jobs but we need to make savings. We can understand that but we would then have concerns about the local identity of reporters moving 20/30 miles from one office to another village or another town and not having that same relationship with the public. In itself that type of cut, while it is not getting rid of journalist jobs, it is reducing the journalists in that town and moving them to another area where there is more centralisation. Other groups like the Scottish Universal Newspapers have put all their sub-editors in one place, like maybe in Irvine, they have put them together, another one at Hamilton, so they would maybe get rid of jobs in a number of other towns and put them all in one area. There was some concern that that would impact on the identity of the local papers and that is something that obviously would be done for the reason of savings but again we think it impacts on quality journalism.

Q42 Mr Wallace: Can I ask about the printing presses. Coming out of my constituency in Lancashire is The Scottish Express on the Richard Desmond-owned presses. How many of the titles are now in trouble because they do not own their own presses and therefore they are up against higher costs from getting their papers printed?

Mr Holleran: It works both ways because Newsquest, for example, I think have quite a lucrative contract with Associated Newspapers with the Daily Mail. They make quite a bit of money out of that. You can understand the Daily Mail, which has a Scottish edition, printing in Scotland. There seems to be quite a bit of ongoing negotiation at the moment with the likes of Trinity, the Daily Record plant there, and with Johnston Press about upgrading their presses. At the moment there is a lot of interest in that area. Some of the weekly groups maybe are feeling vulnerable because of that development. A lot of printing presses have closed down in the last 10 years.

Q43 Mr Wallace: My local one has to compete with the big print rounds of the big papers. It would be like flicking a gnat away from them for the big boys just to say you do not have a slot anymore and that would just finish those smaller papers. They have lost all their independence and also means of production. Is that a worry as well across the board for some of your members?

Mr Holleran: Yes, because you then have to contract printing which can be a concern. What happens in some cases is that some newspaper groups will buy a rival paper just because they have a more modern press and will close the old clapped-out press down, consolidate into one press and then transfer the printing to that press. There are lots of manoeuvres that have been taking place for a number of years like that.

Q44 Chairman: What are the principal dangers presented by regional newspaper monopolies? Do you believe that government should take any action against these monopolies?

Mr Holleran: I have worked in the industry since I left school, which was about 35 years ago, and I have seen a contraction in the size of the number of companies that own newspapers. There are five or six large newspaper groups who have a crossover of national and regional titles. That has reduced quite dramatically over the years. That has led to, I believe, extensive damage to the quality of journalism and also to local identities. I think it is a problem that we could see being exacerbated if newspaper groups buy smaller titles and then transfer them into one central office. That is one of our growing concerns. Lots of small titles have closed in the last year - Trinity have closed over 40 or 50 - which is a major concern that a big newspaper group can buy a number of titles and then start closing them down. Johnston Press in Scotland bought the Argent titles. Argent were an East Anglia-based company and Johnston Press bought the Argent titles last year. They have closed one of their titles down and are now moving the staff from those titles into one production centre which people have concerns about as well. That consolidation of this handful of newspaper companies we have major concerns over. We think that was the start of the deterioration in the industry as they concentrated more on expansion and gobbling up rivals and moving into certain areas and certainly could be accused of setting up cartels in some areas in respect of advertising prices. That has led to a change in management style and an approach to the way newspapers are run and not seen as newspapers that are part of the community, part of the democracy, but seen more as statistics and how shall we get the share prices up. That now seems to be backfiring as companies have over-expanded. The banks are now saying to them you are in danger of breaching your covenant with us, you are not reaching the profit covenants that you previously gave us - the covenants on profit, the levels that you previously suggested - and there is major concern towards two or three of these major newspaper groups at the moment who are running into major cash-flow difficulties. I do not think I am exaggerating - I am sure Mr Hollinshead when he comes to your next hearing will back this - there are major concerns in the industry as to the future of some of the newspaper groups. Some people I know, certainly Ms Bailey, chief executive at Trinity Mirror, is suggesting that the Government should loosen some of the regulations on ownership. We think that would probably be a counterproductive move and that the Government at this stage needs to look at a different model for the media in this country, not follow on the route it has been going for the last ten years where this clamour for expansion and move towards now seven-day merging of titles with a view to trying to maintain profit levels, it is just not the way forward in our view and there needs to be a different approach. Our preference would be something along the lines of a trust group, like the Guardian Media Group. They are not a great example as they are not perfect by any means, or the Irish Times; that type of trust which would be there to protect the quality of the journalism as well as protect the company from obviously misinvestment which is certainly what has happened in the newspaper industry in the last few years in Scotland and in England. That type of trust would provide some protection so that we would have at least one or two national papers in Scotland and the regional papers would be protected. I noted that Andy Burnham is looking at some proposals for closer cooperation between the BBC and regional and local papers. I am not even sure if that goes far enough. I wonder whether there is a need to look at a model that could take away the onus from profit-chasing and maintains the levels of the quality of journalism.

Q45 Chairman: Can I thank the witnesses for their presence. Before I declare the meeting closed would you like to say anything in conclusion or perhaps something we have not covered in our questions?

Mr Holleran: In conclusion, it is about people who are losing jobs. It is about the people who remain trying to cope with the new workload. It is also about the future of journalism and the quality of the newspapers. There is a downward spiral at the moment. Fewer quality journalists can only mean fewer readers and fewer advertisers and it is a downward spiral which ends up in a position that I read out before that Gannett are promoting, and something needs to be done about it otherwise there will be no accountability in this country in a short number of years.

Chairman: Thank you very much for your attendance.

Witnesses: Professor Neil Blain, University of Stirling, and Mr Martin Boyle, Cardonald College, Glasgow, gave evidence.

Q46 Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome. Before we start detailed questions, do you have any opening remarks?

Professor Blain: May I pick up on a very brief point from the last session which was about the success of the Press and Journal and The Courier in Dundee and Aberdeen and whether or not change of ownership in The Scotsman would make a difference. I think the Glasgow and Edinburgh situation is different from that in Aberdeen and Dundee because the media tend to be rather Glasgow-centric. People in Aberdeen and Dundee have more reason to feel that they need a local newspaper, which I think is a major factor. I am not sure that the transfer of ownership will solve The Scotsman's problems.

Mr Boyle: As trainers and educators in journalism we welcome this opportunity. We think it is a very important time in the media and we are delighted to be part of it.

Q47 Chairman: What are the key civic and democratic functions of newspapers in our society? Do you believe that these functions are being, or could be, performed by other media?

Mr Boyle: I think that they have an incredibly important role in society. At the moment they are the only place where questions are asked, particularly of local government. Local newspapers perform a function that no-one else is doing. They hold local decisions to account, they ask the questions and I heard recently someone say as local newspapers disappear in England, and potentially start disappearing in Scotland, we have a democracy deficit. I think that is a very useful way of looking at newspapers. They are not just economic things; they are part of the social and democratic fabric of our country. From that point of view they are incredibly important. It would be wrong to rush towards the internet and think that it solves all of our problems. I do think that has caused some of the issues we have at the moment. The current business model is not working. No-one knows what the future business model will be and that is one of the greatest difficulties. Bloggers tend to produce "comment and froth", was one of the ways it was recently described, and although there are some good ones out there, qualified, trained journalists with experience who talk to you on a daily basis, who have knowledge of the courthouse, of Parliament, et cetera, are invaluable. You do not see bloggers in Parliament; you do not see bloggers at the local council or at the courthouse.

Professor Blain: I completely agree with that and I would extend the point. Martin is talking about local papers. The economics of all Scottish newspapers are in a sense local. We are seeing, for example, at the moment the Manchester Evening News in some difficulty and the Guardian Media Group having to make cuts. For the purposes of considering the economics of London and non London newspapers, The Herald, The Scotsman, the P&J and The Courier fall into roughly the same sort of category that Martin is talking about there. The famous dictum of C P Scott about comment being free but facts are sacred - facts, as many other people have point out, are expensive - and the investment which goes into the newspaper coverage of factual material is considerable. You said can any other media replace what a newspaper does? It is true that an increasing number of people are turning to the internet to get their news but they are browsing news by and large. They are getting news often in bite form and the more in-depth detailed coverage which print newspaper provides can be made available on the web but, by and large, people do not seem to use the internet in that way. I think the depth of news coverage which people engage with is diminished. By the nature of television only a fraction of the number of reports which can be covered by the serious press can be covered by television. A programme like Channel 4s Dispatches, for example, can only on a weekly basis handle one issue in depth. A newspaper or the availability of two or three newspapers can cover several. The implication is that with a change of medium something could be lost, and possibly is being lost.

Q48 Pete Wishart: What is accounting then if it is not the internet? Obviously the crisis collapse in Scottish newspapers preceded the financial crises. What has accounted for it?

Professor Blain: If we look at the Scottish situation, it has a slight complication because both in the United States and in the United Kingdom newspaper sales are diminishing. Newspapers are having to go onto the internet. The Guardian in Britain probably took the lead in doing this with Guardian Unlimited. What happens is that when newspapers shift onto the internet they do not get the revenue back which they lose from their readership who leave the print edition. If you ask why do they do it, the answer is they do not really have much choice. They could not not develop a new technology because it does look as though that is where younger media consumers are headed, but they do it at a loss and the loss is becoming quite serious. The difficulty of Scotland is compounded by the fact that since the middle of the 1990s it became easier for London-based newspapers to distribute in Scotland because of developments like satellite printing and therefore you have the irony that London papers have done increasingly better in Scotland, but the overall context is one of decline. The other question is demographic and has to do with age. We do not know what the under 25s are going to do in the future. They do not seem to watch a lot of television or read newspapers or, for that matter, listen to the radio very much. They interact with social networking sites, mobile telephony and so on. They might come back to more traditional media and they might not. If you are in the newspaper business you need to assume that the growth area will be the internet but it is just not producing the revenue to fill the gap.

Q49 Mr McGovern: I am not particularly familiar with computers and information technology. I buy a number of newspapers every day but the local press back in Dundee while I am here in London, I just go to the DC Thomson website and get The Courier and the Evening Telegraph and I can read I think it is the top five stories or something from each. You do not get the full coverage. Does the fact that I am now accessing that via computer rather than actually buying hard copy have a detrimental effect on the journalist? Does DC Thomson make money out of my accessing their website?

Mr Boyle: They are trying to make money through advertising revenue. Essentially for every hit on the website they are saying to advertisers we have X number of readers regularly coming to this site. The simple economic view is that if you have a product that you give away for nothing you do not have a product. At the moment that is what the newspaper industry is struggling with. They have gone from one traditional well-established business model to essentially no business model that works. We can all read the Daily Record now for nothing here and that is the problem.

Q50 Chairman: If the majority of newspapers are providing information on the internet and one or two do not, then most of the people will think in terms of advertisements that they might lose out.

Professor Blain: Almost everyone is moving to the internet to some extent. There is an assumption built in here at the moment that you keep the print editions going because you know, as Martin has just said, you have a business model there that you understand that can make money. There have been some calculations done in the United States - as everyone probably knows it is not just the British newspaper market which is in decline, in the United States it is also in very steep decline - looking at very big selling newspapers in the States, like the New York Times. Somebody calculated a year or so back that if the New York Times had to have a business model as successful as its print-based model then its website would have to be one of the half dozen most popular websites on the internet; in other words, you would have to have an extraordinary number of hits because the advertising model is different. You are probably selling a smaller number of adverts which are expensive if they reach a very large number of readers. One of the ironies when newspapers go onto the internet is that they are reaching, and can prove they are reaching, a larger number of readers, but that is not being matched by advertising revenue for a number of reasons, one of which is that there are other internet sites, for example, the home sites of internet providers and various other internet sites which are also taking the advertising, so the advertising is being spread around the internet quite widely.

Q51 Mr Walker: The current downturn in revenue is obviously being worsened by the dip in advertising revenues that we have seen over the last year. When the economy recovers do you expect to see newspapers lagging behind in that recovery?

Professor Blain: Yes is the answer to that. There is the general newspaper market; we are talking about the Scottish market. The sales of indigenous Scottish newspapers have been in steep decline well before the present economic downturn. The problem there is really caused by a lack of competitiveness against the editionalised Scottish newspapers based in London benefiting from all the resources which London newspapers have. There is nothing to suggest that that will change if there is an economic upturn because the relative disadvantage of Scottish newspapers in resource terms will be maintained, but at the same time in a wider context newspapers are selling fewer copies in any case. The only sensible answer one can give to that is whatever proportion of the problem is caused by the current economic downturn may well be rectified but it will not really make much difference to what is becoming an overall decline in the newspaper market and really quite a frightening decline in Scotland for indigenous Scottish titles.

Mr Boyle: The problem we have here anyway is I suspect the economic downturn has hastened this but we would have got to this position anyway. We have spoken about the problems with the business model, we have spoken about the problems of the internet; those pressures were driving us towards this position. In reality, irrespective of financial problems, over the next five to ten years the business model problem is going to exist. The chances are at a local level, and I think probably Dundee we have a pretty good example, we have a paper which is always going to have a loyal following but in reality what we are going to have is more and more people moving away from that model and five or ten years where the business struggles to find another viable one because they have not identified one yet.

Q52 Mr Walker: What concerns me is that young people seem to be moving away from newspapers but they do not actually seem to be seeking in the numbers you would expect that equivalent news on the internet. It seems that they are not really interested in civic and civil society. We have a number that move towards being interested in single issue type subjects - global warming, saving polar bears, and I do not mean to be pejorative but I get lots of letters from people who are very much concerned about that - but what we are not seeing is youngsters demonstrating an interest in what shapes their society and what shapes the world in the way that perhaps we did ten or 15 years ago.

Professor Blain: This is a difficult one to predict. Only recently have there been available these competitor technologies which take up a lot of the attention of young people. We have seen massive development in an area like mobile telephony. We have seen the internet which, historically, not so long ago the web was devoid of content and now it has lots of content. What is difficult to predict is are the young people that we are identifying, I think you are right, really not reading newspapers, not watching television very much, probably not absorbing very much news at all, or are they, as it were, going through a phase and will they in their later 20s, or when they are 30, return to what is left of the traditional media? If not, the implications for the democratic process are quite worrying because it becomes harder and harder to know on what basis of information people make political judgments and a wide variety of social and cultural judgments. You will hear both optimistic and pessimistic views on this; optimists saying at a certain age people will return and they will want hard news and if, for example, The Scotsman and Herald were both to get into terminal difficulty, and for that matter the P&J and The Courier, there would then be an outcry and something would happen and one quality Scottish newspaper would be saved and these young people would return to reading in their late 20s. There is another view which says that there is a difficulty which is that in depth information on political, economic and social issues is not going to meet with the same level of engagement over the next five or ten years and that this is something we should worry about and need to do something proactive about. It is a difficult one to predict.

Q53 Chairman: Which groups of people are most dependent on newspapers for their information and do you think this will continue to be the case?

Mr Boyle: At the moment the people that we see continually dependent on newspapers are people in small towns, the elderly and people who are not yet connected to digital media. It is a mistake to only talk about digital media and assume 100 per cent coverage, 100 per cent uptake and complete literacy with it because that does not yet exist. Certainly with the generation coming through colleges and universities just now we are heading towards that but in small and medium-sized towns and communities across Scotland there is a big group there that is starting to miss out on crucial news as quantity and quality both drop.

Professor Blain: It may very well be also that in certain local markets local newspapers, assuming that they can retain a reasonably sound economic base, will still be popular enough to survive. I am thinking of newspapers like the West Highland Free Press and so on. It is difficult to predict, particularly when in Scotland you can get people living in some of the far flung areas who in some sense end up feeling doubly distanced from the sources of information. They are a long way from London and they are also a long way from Glasgow. It may well be that some local markets of that sort survive for certain kinds of local newspaper. A lot of concern in Scotland recently has been for dailies precisely like The Scotsman, the Herald, and the P&J.

Q54 Mr McGovern: The first question that I intended to ask if it is possible in cover terms and that question was is the decline in the circulation of Scottish newspapers been reflected in similar markets in other countries? The supplementary to that question is have any papers in similar markets in similar countries shown that they are able to buck the trend? If I were to ask not so much a question but ask you for a view or an observation: when I was first elected here my wife and I went on one of these open top bus tours and the bus went down Fleet Street and apparently the only major publisher still in Fleet Street is DC Thomson but I cannot get The Courier here in Westminster, which I regard as ironic. Also about two or three months ago, prior to that we were always able to get The Herald here but for some reason or another we can no longer get The Herald here in Westminster. I just wondered if you had a view on that in addition to my earlier question. Every day we were able to get a Herald here and for some reason that has stopped. Do you have a view on that? Also the question on similar markets in similar countries and whether they have managed to buck this trend?

Mr Boyle: There are very few examples of papers significantly bucking the trend. There are one or two but generally they are seen as the exceptions at the moment. England is certainly badly hit by local titles disappearing and the analogy there has been a town losing its collective memory. For that type of thing to be happening and the threat of that to potentially move towards Scotland is certainly something that concerns us greatly.

Professor Blain: If you look at Ireland, the Irish Times is very well distributed. The Irish Times is run by the Irish Times Trust which is comparable to the Scott Trust which runs the Guardian Manchester Evening News. The Irish Times has actually been used as a model by more than one Scottish newspaper editor in the past for the sort of national Scottish newspaper which ought to exist. It is a fact that even with the advantages which Ireland has as a very distinct country and the advantages which the Irish Times has being run by a trust, that in fact Irish newspapers are also having to fight a defensive battle against London titles as much as, for example, RTE, indigenous Irish broadcasting, has an enormous amount of competition on its hands from London. This does not sound very optimistic, but even when you have most of the advantages which you can imagine going for you, because I heard our predecessors in the previous session say that their ideal model might be a trust rather like the Scott Trust for a Scottish newspaper, even if you have that you are still in a competitive situation. You were talking about "bucking the trend". I am not sure if anyone is moving in the right direction, but if you look to the Irish media you probably have a slightly better model there for survival than we have in Scotland, but they are still feeling the competition from London. This is partly a problem in Scotland as any small Anglophone country is going to have a lot of competition in broadcasting and the press from bigger producers producing very attractive products in the English language. If you are in Norway or Denmark your audience in a sense is captive in the way that ours is not. The language problem is a very important one here. It is in miniature the problem which London broadcasting producers have with people bringing out very expensive American broadcasting products. It is to some extent an English language difficulty.

Q55 Mr McGovern: Do you not agree that it is something of a paradox that elected Members here in Westminster want these newspapers but cannot get them but at the same time they want us to support them?

Professor Blain: Yes, it is very odd. That is a change because it used to be much easier to get both The Scotsman and The Herald in London than it is now.

Mr Boyle: There is that assumption that you will go online and that people do not want to have paper in their hands anymore, so if you are outside that small circulation area that you are quite happy to go and find it on the internet. I think that idea has started to grow more.

Q56 Mr Walker: It is much nicer to read a newspaper with your toast and marmalade than to go online with your toast and marmalade. There is a culture I think that it is nice to pick up a newspaper and hold it.

Professor Blain: The entire aesthetics of newspapers have disappeared, including the sports titles. I think Sheffield still has The Green'un, the Saturday sports edition. We used to have these up and down the country. There is a very great deal of them lost because of the retreat of printers.

Q57 Chairman: The Newspaper Society and the Society of Editors have called on the Government to consider effective ways in which Google and others could be prevented from profiting from third party content without recompense to or consent from those who generated the material. Are you aware of any successful models for doing this?

Professor Blain: Could you open up that question for us a little more, please?

Q58 Chairman: These two organisations are asking the Government that they use effective means in which Google and others could be prevented from making profits.

Professor Blain: It is very difficult to do that. It is very difficult to regulate international media and it is very difficult to regulate one provider in the internet without regulating lots of providers on the internet.

Mr Boyle: I do, as a Society of Editors member, absolutely understand where they are coming from. Paul's members who he represents are slogging at the coalface and finding it incredibly tough and the conditions are worsening and they are finding it very hard. To see Google, et cetera, use that for absolutely nothing for profit is obviously difficult. It is a reasonable problem that information does cost money. It is something we have spoken about quite a lot today. Sending journalists out to the court, to parliaments, et cetera, is a hefty undertaking.

Q59 Chairman: Do you think then that the Newspaper Society and the Society of Editors are asking something which is not achievable?

Professor Blain: No. It probably is in theory achievable but it is part of a much larger debate about intellectual property rights. I do not think anyone contests that there are very sound ethical arguments which would wish to restrict the free use which people make of other people's intellectual property in the present day. It is not just the internet, as we know; it is music downloads, it is pirate videos; it is a whole area of things. The practice of doing it can be legally complex and of course very expensive. It may be that this is the kind of issue which is worth pursuing. I do not know whether one Society such as the Society of Newspaper Editors can do it by itself, but it may be the kind of restriction which has to be sought as part of a larger settlement about intellectual property. I agree that it is unfair, but in practice these things, as we have seen in the field of music or cinema, can be very difficult to regulate.

Q60 Pete Wishart: These are the very issues that Digital Britain caps review was set in place to try and tackle and look at and there are some useful things in there about responsibility that should be placed on the internet by providers, for example, and I think the Google thing that was asked by the Chair is a perfectly feasible example. Why should other people's intellectual property be used on these sites without any sort of recompense? Can I challenge this assumption about a generation lost to the media. I do not accept that at all. I have got a 17-year-old son who is off to university after the summer and he is particularly well-informed and his peer group are particularly well-informed young people. I think it is to do with proliferation in news availability. There is something like four or five full-time news channels on TV and whether it is Facebook or whether it is MySpace, the news appears and emerges on these things, and also the way that they find the information that they require on the internet probably much more adeptly than I will, or Jim will, or the Chairman would. They do have this ability to do it. Your responsibility is in preparing the next generation of journalists and how they engage with that. What are you doing as professors and the teachers to try and make sure that the new journalists of the future are prepared for the new technologies?

Professor Blain: I think you are right to caution against sweeping generalisations and we acknowledged that earlier about how people use the media. One encounters a rather extreme set of claims here about that. As somebody who heads a department which teaches journalism students, journalist students by the nature of what they have chosen do tend to engage a great deal with the news, as do students in most form of media education. I would agree with you to a point. One of the things we are finding is that younger people, and students for example, are consuming news information just on different media now. For example, there is some degree of convergence where people want to pick up information from broadcasting on their computer. We would have to get into quite a lot of detail about which groups are engaging with news and which are not and that would have to do with socioeconomic factors and age factors. I think there is a general tendency for there to be less viewing of television, less listening to radio, less reading of newspapers by under 25s but I agree with you they are certainly not a generation lost to the media, however the question is whether in switching media, whether in moving to social networking sites, moving to mobile telephony, there is a degree of disengagement with hard information of the sort which has been carried by traditional media. People are getting different results measuring this with different groups.

Q61 Pete Wishart: As a professor who has obviously engaged and involved with students that must concern you quite a lot because what you are actually suggesting is because of changing technologies that young people are not as informed as they should be or as informed as perhaps our generation was. What are you doing to try and address that? How are you getting this content onto the places where young people are accessing that information? How do we bridge that gap? If you guys do not have the answer to that, who has?

Mr Boyle: The original question was what are we doing? One of the things that I personally strongly believe is that journalism training needs to remain focused on core journalism skills. We cannot be too seduced by Twitter, by Google, by Facebook and lose sight of the fact that there are core things that journalists need to be able to do. The guys who come to interview you to ask you questions need to be able to do certain things. For us we still base all of our training on news writing, shorthand, law and public affairs. Each journalism student is trained how to do those basic skills before they go out to learn how to do anything else. For us it is under the auspices of NCTJ. The National Council for Training of Journalists is UK-wide. It guides journalism training down a specific training route which is essentially geared towards ensuring that journalists are as well informed and as well trained as they could possibly be. For us, shorthand, legal knowledge, knowledge of political affairs has to always be at the centre of it because journalists are and should be professionals. It is a special skill and we do not want to move away from that.

Professor Blain: It is relatively easy for those of us who have journalism or media students to answer your question because, by and large, a lot of what we do demands that they know a great deal about what is happening in the news and they tend to be the types of students who are doing this anyway. If you consider the 50 per cent or so, let us say, of the Scottish population now in tertiary education, I think there is a broader question about those who do not have any specialist interest in news about what is happening there. I do not think that is something that can be picked up for the first time in the tertiary colleges or the universities. In a sense this process has to be wound back down into schools. I view with nervousness, for example, the de-emphasising of the teaching of history. I am old enough to remember that one of the central subjects I studied at primary school was a thing called "general knowledge". I think these are things that you have to wind back right to the very beginning of the education system and then keep them there. As you have said, there are a lot of well-informed people in the 18-25 or 16-25 year group around, but I think there is a trend towards disengagement with the kind of media which give people a broad range of information in relative depth. We are talking about something relative which is nonetheless quite significant.

Q62 Chairman: You will be aware that UK advertising expenditure in newspapers has fallen by 12 per cent while overall advertising expenditure has fallen only four per cent. What is the reason for this?

Mr Boyle: The move towards advertising on the internet and towards spending on the internet, and Google overtook television channels last year for the first time as a bigger advertiser, has certainly hit newspapers. When you can clearly look and see that newspaper sales are going down, advertisers are going to move away from that; it is a natural reaction.

Q63 Mr Walker: There are also fewer jobs being advertised and fewer properties being advertised in newspapers as well and if there are fewer of those on the market there is just less revenue.

Professor Blain: There have been very significant decisions, as we know, like councils deciding to remove advertising en bloc. The core point is that for certain kinds of advertisers if you are looking at year on year very substantial declines in the circulation of newspapers you start to think this is not the best place any more. All of us now - we do it in the universities - still like to place most adverts in certain key print publications, but I suppose if it came to a choice that you could only do one or the other we would all tend now to go to the internet.

Q64 Chairman: We see this change in advertising revenue, 2007 on 2006 is -0.3 per cent; 2008 on 2007 is -12 per cent. How do you think it will be this year compared to last year?

Mr Boyle: I think it is only going to continue. I would like to hope that it is not going to continue exponentially like that but I do believe it will be a continuation of that. With the move away from local government adverts from newspapers onto the internet and so on, even the classifieds, taking it down to the smallest level and people selling their cars, used wedding dresses and so on, those sort of things are moving to Autotrader.co.uk rather than the Green Telegraph and that has a big hit on a paper of that size.

Professor Blain: We sometimes forget that there is still a steady take-up of internet use by a significant proportion of the population who have not been "wired" so if you think of the damage which has been done to traditional media in terms of advertising revenue by only a substantial proportion of the population habitually using the internet, when you have a scenario when a very large number, the overwhelming majority habitually use the internet, that suggests a migration of even more revenue than now. Unfortunately, it is very hard to find an optimistic scenario for this sort of revenue returning.

Q65 Chairman: How many free newspapers are there in Scotland? Is this proportional to the number in the UK as a whole? If not, what are the reasons for this?

Mr Boyle: I would say it is fairly similar. It generally looks the same across the board. More have been lost in England than have so far in Scotland certainly. I think it is around 50 closed in England. At the moment that has not crossed north of the border.

Professor Blain: The one thing I find just informally from talking to groups of students about what they read - and I do not know how we got this far in without mentioning Metro - is that if they do pick up the newspaper and if it is the only one they look at it is the Metro. In Glasgow they pick it up as they get on the underground in the morning. If you just do an informal study of who is reading what you see an awful lot of Metros. I do not know if there is a lesson there and, if there is a lesson, I am not quite sure what it is for traditional print newspaper producers in that.

Mr Boyle: At the moment what we have to look at is the traditional print producers have a problem in that things like Metro and the internet are working better. What we need is possibly a period of assessments, protection and help to ensure that we do not lose vital titles as they try to find a new way through this problem. They are going to have to find a new way through it because what they have at the moment is not going to work.

Professor Blain: Let's imagine for a second that print newspapers just stopped existing and you might say in that case would not the advertising revenue which they have been enjoying in print form eventually migrate to the internet so that they would become viable? The answer appears to be no because during that process a lot of that revenue which finds itself into such a diffuse number of internet sites that they would simply never get that back and it would not be just that they did not get all of it back; they would get a fraction of it back. There is a kind of paradox here which has been recognised for some time. The newspaper industry itself knows that it is moving towards the internet but it also knows that that spells the end of financial viability and nobody is very sure what to do about it. The Americans looked down this road slightly further than we did and they still have not really come up with an answer either. It does suggest the need for some very proactive response if particularly societies take the decision that we need to do something to preserve at least a proportion of what we have got. The 17 or whatever it is titles that we have in Scotland on a daily basis just now are just not going to survive. The Scottish market is very heavily crowded. It is often seen as the most competitive market there is because of the presence of both Scottish and English newspapers in it. Despite the fact that the Scots are very major newspaper readers, we are simply not going to have that number of titles in ten years. It is not possible.

Q66 Chairman: How does the size and structure of the Scottish press industry compare to that of other countries of similar size? Do the closures and job losses currently being experienced represent a movement to a more press newspaper industry?

Professor Blain: It is hard to compare one country with another because there are some small countries which maybe have only one of two very successful newspapers. That, in a sense, is one of the difficulties that we face in Scotland that because of a competitive situation with a number of Scottish editions of London newspapers and those remaining titles which are published in Glasgow, Edinburgh or elsewhere, we have many more newspapers than any other comparable small country.

Q67 Pete Wishart: Is that actually correct? Are you including the English editionalised titles?

Professor Blain: I am thinking of what we might call "dailies" and not necessarily including my local paper, for example, fighting for survival the Paisley Daily Express. It is unusual to have because we have got the Scottish Daily Mail, The Sun, The Record and so on. It is unusual to have in that sense national dailies in that number. The Sunday market is pretty crowded as well.

Q68 Pete Wishart: We do not have as many exclusively Scottish titles as, for instance, in Ireland and Denmark, comparable nations. We have more titles because we have a peculiar situation where we get UK-based titles editionalised in Scotland, so it is not really like with like, is it?

Professor Blain: But it is that which is really causing the problem. If you get a situation where the Daily Mail has been selling consistently between, let's say 115,000-120,000 in Scotland, which, as has been pointed out, is now more than The Scotsman and Herald sell between them. The Telegraph and The Times now sell between them more than The Scotsman which is a situation one could never have envisaged a number of years ago.

Q69 Pete Wishart: The Courier sells more than The Scotsman and The Herald combined.

Professor Blain: Yes, and the Press and Journal is still selling just 80,000. Although this situation is very artificial having London-based tartan editions or editions wearing a kilt in Scotland, that is the one which we face. It is never very easy to oppose something which is counterfactual. What would the Scottish newspaper industry be like if the Mail, the Scottish Sun, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and The Independent were not there? I do not know if there is any point in speculating because they are there. What it does imply is if we are collectively worried about that effect, there needs to be a Scottish newspaper good enough and of a high enough quality to sell more copies than either The Scotsman, nor The Herald or the P&J are doing just now.

Q70 Mr Walker: There are only two careers I would advise my children not to go into: politics and journalism. Journalists seem to be distraught about the quality of politicians and politicians seem to be distraught about the quality of journalists and journalism; and bankers, although there are massive compensations still to being a banker! I do have a genuine concern as far as the press in the evidence given before where you have fewer journalists being asked to produce more copy and that has to impact the quality of journalists and their ability to do their job and you will eventually get newspapers that are written by a third party via a press release that is barely checked and it is shoved in. How can we reverse that?

Mr Boyle: That is undoubtedly the case. I share the concern 100 per cent. As a former journalist moving from a newspaper into academia, some of the papers I worked in now have one half or one third of the staff doing exactly the same thing, quite often on half the wages as well. That has an enormous impact on all sorts of things and quality is the first one. On a paper when I was there with a reasonable staffing level we have someone at the local council most days; we would have someone at the court for anything approaching a good story; we would have someone there for every single fatal accident inquiry. Now they cross their fingers and hope for a press release most of the time. You are tied to a phone and a desk. These are well-trained, well-intentioned professionals who genuinely want to do a good job and, quite often, cannot. That is only going to affect the quality of our titles.

Professor Blain: It has always been the case that the Scottish newspapers relied, for example, more on press agency reports and the London papers because they have generally been less well-resourced. In some ways the answer to your question rather depends on where we are talking about. It is perfectly possible that London, Paris and various other places will still, because of the size of their markets, be able to support reasonably well-resourced print titles, even if the overall numbers are reduced, which they probably will be. The trouble is with a country of five million people like Scotland is that is a much more open question. I heard at the end of the last session somebody saying well the answer is the Scott Trust or an Irish Times trust in Scotland, but the Scott Trust only happened because one of the Scott family decided to give quite a lot of money for a variety of reasons to set up that trust. It usually needs a proprietor to do that but the big Scottish newspapers are owned by public limited companies which have shareholder obligations, shareholders who have profit expectations and I do not know how you magic a trust situation out of a plc.

Q71 Chairman: Can I thank the witnesses for their attendance. Before I declare the meeting closed, would you like to say anything in conclusion or add some area which we have not covered?

Mr Boyle: The future of local, regional and national press in Scotland is incredibly important. It is going to go through five or ten years of intense pressure. There are going to be continuing drives for profit, there are going to be continuing drives for survival and that is going to impact on quality. From the training at colleges and universities through to a number of groups we are trying to protect that as much as possible and it is good that we are now discussing the potential avenues that we can look at.

Professor Blain: I would add that rather than being optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the Scottish press, it might be better to be determined to save at least one quality Scottish newspaper.

Chairman: Thank you.