04-07-2025
Good journalism has never had a more vital role
One story has stuck in my mind. A local businessman came to my office when I was the editor of a newspaper in Ayrshire. He had been in court earlier that day and had been fined for driving after he had been drinking.
He had noticed that one of the newspaper's reporters had been in court that morning and he was very keen that the story of his appearance should not be in that week's paper. So keen that he not so gently reminded me how much he spent advertising his business in my paper and suggested that pattern might not continue if the story was published. To be honest, these decisions are not particularly difficult for newspaper editors.
If word gets around that you are willing to be bribed to keep stories out of your pages there would be a queue of people outside your office door every week. Worse, your credibility and that of your publication would eventually be destroyed. Why would people continue to buy it?
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But there is an important principle at stake as well as simply keeping your job. Court reporting is a vital part of the proceedings. Justice has not only to be done but has to be seen to be done. Judges have to act in the public view to ensure punishments are transparent and fair.
The businessman was far from happy when his story was published, probably with a bit more prominence than would have been the case had he not come to my office. But, in all honestly, there was no other decision I could take.
Court reporting was part of the bread and butter of local journalism. So too was covering council meetings. As a reporter, I spent hours listening to debates on planning matters, licence applications, neighbourhood disputes and political power struggles in the area.
(Image: NQ)
Returning to the office, I'd have enough material for a bunch of page leads and stories which would fill many column inches. But more than that, council coverage was and still is an essential part of democracy. Voters could find out what their elected representatives were up to and what decisions and actions were being taken in their name.
These were not always the most glamorous of stories but they were more interesting than those I harvested from local community centres when the local tombola winners were regular features of the village notes columns.
I didn't appreciate it then, but I was learning the same skills I would need when I would later cover the big stories of the day for national newspapers – get the facts, understand the context and report it all accurately. You had to do a good job or colleagues in rival titles would expose your inadequacies. Standards in local journalism were too high to allow stupid mistakes to go unnoticed.
All these musings were prompted by preparing for a presentation to the Scottish Parliament last week by the Scottish Public Interest Journalism Institute (Spiji), which I chair.
The creation of Spiji was recommended by a working party set up by the Scottish Government to look into the challenges faced by the Scottish media. It was deemed necessary because, frankly, Scottish journalism was in crisis.
The introduction of online news platforms has transformed the industry irrevocably. Readers have moved from print to online platforms, taking most of the advertising with them.
(Image: Newsquest)
Publishers have seen their income dwindle and their efforts to replace print revenues with digital income have met with only limited success. They have reinvented their businesses.
All the large news titles have their own websites, most now behind paywalls. A new focus on subscriptions has tried and to an extent succeeded in persuading readers to become more regular customers.
Nonetheless, the biggest beneficiaries of the digital world are tech giants such as social media companies who use news publishers' content to drive their traffic and boost their own profits.
Whether they pay enough for their use of that content has been hotly debated for years. It probably won't surprise you that I don't think they do. What is not up for debate is that while big tech pockets eye-watering profits, newspaper resources have dramatically shrunk.
When I worked on local newspapers, each had their own editor and their own healthily-sized staffs. Bigger towns such as, for example, Ayr and Irvine had more than one title competing for readers. Standards were high and communities were well served with a diet of stories from courts and councils and those unearthed from local contacts.
Those newspapers also served as rigorous training grounds for journalists, equipping them with the skills needed to tackle stories in the national press.
Today, many of these local titles have shrunk to shadows of their former selves. They now share editors and reporters among the different titles. They simply cannot supply the news service they once did. They just don't have the resources. National newspapers have been left reeling from continual rounds of redundancies. Staffing and paginations have been reduced.
The Spiji presentation to Holyrood featured testimonials from young journalists driven from the trade by relentless cost cutting.
The international news reporter Jen Stout, author of Night Train to Odesa, spoke about the financial problems which beset Scottish journalists wanting to file eyewitness reports from global war zones.
As a result very few can do so and they are freelancers rather than staffers.
When I was editor of the Sunday Herald and The National I was incredibly proud to publish essential reports from Ukraine, Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world by my amazing colleague David Pratt. David is still filing those reports but I think it's fair to say the efforts he has to make to do so would amaze readers. Without David and Jen, Scotland's global viewpoint would go almost entirely unreported.
(Image: Anatolii Stepanov, REUTERS)
Ironically, the demand for accurate, gripping journalism has never been larger. Journalism is journalism, whether you consume it in print or on a digital platform. The problem is that the business model no longer properly sustains it.
Our large news organisations cannot plug the income gap left by departing advertising revenues. Without them, how can they meet the cost of funding their newsrooms other than by cutting that cost?
Of course, I'm aware that many can find little sympathy for journalists who write stories with which they disagree. But surely we can agree that good journalism, journalism that seeks to tell the truth, that holds power to account, that unearths the stories that the public has a right to know, has an essential role to play in the promotion and preservation of democracy. And that is particularly true in an age where the onslaught of fake news and disinformation is growing ever more overwhelming, with much of it being produced by some of the most powerful people in the world.
You don't need to look hard to see the terrible effect fake news can have. The riots in Southport which followed a single social media post wrongly claiming the suspect in fatal stabbings at a children's dance class was an immigrant is just one recent example of the dangers.
On this most basic level there needs to be journalism that serves as a counter-narrative to that promoted by those who would prefer to keep the truth hidden, who want to manipulate public opinion for their own ends, who are determined to bury facts that are awkward for their own purposes.
We need a media-literate population capable of separating truth from fact, of finding reliable sources of news we can trust, of uncovering the tactics of those who want instead to keep us in ignorance. To create that literacy we need to support high-quality public interest journalism.
The promotion and protection of that journalism is what the Scottish Public Interest Journalism Institute was set up to provide. We'll soon be unveiling our plans to do just that.
