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Item 2 is the committee's continuing consideration of the Scottish local newspaper industry. I am pleased to welcome Professor Neil Blain, head of film, media and journalism at the University of Stirling; David Hutchison, visiting professor in media policy at Glasgow Caledonian University; James Thickett, director of market research and market intelligence at the Office of Communications; and Alan Stewart, head of broadcasting and telecoms at Ofcom Scotland. Thank you all for joining us this morning and for your written submissions in advance of the meeting.
Is that a general question?
Yes.
We all probably agree on the various factors that are hurting newspapers—I referred to some of them in my submission. For example, the young, who are not overrepresented here this morning, do not seem very interested in reading newspapers; there is competition from the internet; and there is cyclical pressure from the recession.
It is worth adding that there is a danger of a vicious cycle: where resources are squeezed, quality diminishes further, which impacts on revenue. It is a dynamic situation.
Newspaper circulation decline is not a new thing, as the convener said. If you look at the statistics, you will see that both local and national newspapers in Scotland have been in decline since the 1970s. The cover price has gone up correspondingly.
Last week, we touched on the issue of how much advertising space is taken up in newspapers. We will come to the issue of advertising revenue. I am particularly interested in how much of a local newspaper is advertising and how much is new information for the people who pick it up. What pressures is the newspaper industry under? Is the drive to obtain advertising potentially threatening the quality and quantity of information in our newspapers?
In our review of local media, we did not find any evidence that advertising was crowding out quality content. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that advertising is one of the reasons why people buy a local newspaper. It accounts for a much bigger proportion of local newspapers' revenues than it does of national newspapers' revenues, which come largely from the cover price. One of the reasons why people buy their local newspaper is that they want to know about local businesses, property, motors and jobs.
Advertising has always been fundamental to the local paper. As James Thickett said, it has a valuable social function. The figures that we academics tend to work on are that national and regional tabloids, such as the Daily Record, get 50 per cent of their revenue from advertising, for broadsheets such as The Scotsman, The Herald, The Times and The Independent, the figure is 70 per cent, and for local press it is 70 per cent. The dependence of the local press on advertising is substantial. I hope that nobody loses sight of the fact that, even in these difficult times, if you look at the percentage of revenue that goes to profits, you will see that the chain newspaper companies are doing not too badly. Only a few years ago, 30 per cent of revenue was profit. Marks and Spencer had a very good year three years ago when 9 per cent of its revenue was profit. Even today, the latest figures that I have seen suggest that some of the companies, some of whose representatives you have spoken to, are still making rather good returns.
Have publishers managed to get right the balance between dividends for shareholders, remuneration for directors and resources for journalism? When the National Union of Journalists spoke to the committee last week, it expressed concern about the increased pressure to which the journalists whom it represents are subject. Journalists are now expected not only to write and search out stories but to write up advertising features. The NUJ does not believe that the balance is as good as it could be.
In the past, publishers have not got the balance right and have been far too profitable. More money could have been spent on journalism, and there would still have been excellent returns for shareholders and reasonable remuneration packages for chief executives, some of whom have done extraordinarily well on the local newspaper scene in Scotland and elsewhere.
The other question is what we can do about it. We are quite unlikely to get consensus on the matter between the NUJ and the proprietors. There is little doubt that the ideal model of the local, paid-for weekly newspaper that most of us have must be sufficiently well resourced to allow traditional functions such as investigative reporting to be taken seriously. I take the point that people read local newspapers for advertising but, anecdotally, over a long period, a number of people report disappointment at the loss of hard news and investigation in local newspapers.
In an earlier answer, Mr Thickett mentioned that young people, in particular, are looking to source local news in different ways. Some local newspapers have invested considerably in websites and in sharing web-based information. At the same time, however, publishers have indicated a problem in that they are competing in that web marketplace with the BBC, which, in their view, has limitless resources to put into its website. They believe that there is an unfair balance. What do you think of the local newspapers' move towards using the internet? Have they got that right? Could they have done anything differently?
I will draw a comparison with the experience of national and regional newspapers. It is difficult to derive a satisfactory business model for moving from print to the internet; everyone knows that. It is true in other countries, and it has been known in the United States for some time. A lot of advertising is lost to other internet sources. It is probably all the more difficult—at least in theory—for local newspapers to move to the internet, as everyone is finding it quite difficult.
Local newspapers came to the internet relatively late in comparison to national newspapers, because the consumer profile of local newspapers tends to consist of older people who are less likely to have internet access. However, it is imperative that the internet now forms part of those newspapers' business models.
It strikes me that local newspapers are often very good at campaigning on issues. My local newspaper certainly does so quite regularly. It views itself as a local champion and wants to stand up for its readers. When it believes that there has been an injustice—whether it involves the local council, the Scottish Government or a private company—it is willing to run with that campaign. It has been suggested to me that, if there is a greater reliance on one particular news medium, such as television, it will not be so easy to get into the local issues. The BBC and STV might cover a one-off story about a set of school closures in a certain area or an accident and emergency unit closing, for instance, but there will not be a sustained campaign on television like the campaigns that local newspapers are often able to maintain. The newspapers will have a commitment and will not be willing to let the issue drop. Is that true? Do you agree that we might lose something if local newspapers do not do such work?
That is a fair point. You could legitimately argue that chain ownership can be helpful. A locally owned local newspaper could find a story that might prove very embarrassing for a local business, for example, and it might hesitate, whereas chain ownership can provide support to a local newspaper editor in such situations. There is a famous example in the north of England involving a wrongful conviction for murder. An editor pursued the matter, which must have made him very unpopular, but his employer supported him.
Your point can be put even more strongly, convener. We might consider the possibility of areas of invisibility opening up around local matters. There is a spectrum. Discussions are already going on at the regional level within Scotland.
I agree with everything that has been said. We believe that local newspapers are an essential part of the local media ecology, not only because of their campaigning role but because they act as a training ground for journalists who go on to work in the national press, television or radio. That is an important, core role of local newspapers.
David Hutchison's point about the distinction between the local and the regional is well made, and Ofcom grapples with it quite a bit. When we do our deliberative research and hold workshops with small samples of people, we try to delve into that to some depth. We try to tease out what the Scottish national, regional and truly local interests are. I accept that it is quite a difficult area because the definitions mean different things to different people, but we do try to tease out the truly local interests.
That is a key point. I cannot imagine most of my constituents who want to know what community activity is happening in Airdrie and the surrounding villages ever going to the BBC website to find that information. They would never dream of it. They might just about look at the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser website, but they are much more likely to pick up a copy of the paper and read that because they know that it is a reliable source of information and they will get a good picture of what is happening in their community. If that paper is not there to provide that information, I am not sure who would provide it. That would make our communities weaker because we would not know what is happening and would not be able to share such information, good, bad or indifferent as it sometimes is.
Of course, if the BBC website covered that kind of material, local newspaper proprietors would be upset; we have heard that sort of debate already. Ergo, the BBC will continue not to do that on the assumption that the East Kilbride News, the Hamilton Advertiser and the West Highland Free Press will continue to exist. The problem is that if the existence of local newspapers in an area is threatened and a large national broadcaster does not provide that kind of local coverage, that will leave a very large gap.
As members probably know, a couple of years ago, the BBC applied to set up a local video service across the UK, which would have meant 60 separate online video services. The BBC trust and Ofcom rejected the application on market impact grounds.
I want to ask a bit more about the impact of chain ownership on local newspapers. David Hutchison made some suggestions in his submission. Could you expand on them a wee bit more?
You have also had a paper from a former journalist—a gentleman from the Borders—who talked about the importance of local ownership. I accept that we can romanticise local ownership, and I argue that, because chains benefit from economies of scale, they can lead to more efficient operations through the more efficient use of journalists, print capacity and so on.
Yes, it does.
If we could answer that, we would not be sitting here this morning—we would be somewhere else drawing rather large consultancy fees. We are in a strange transition period: James Thickett from Ofcom may have more to say on that. Some of my students, who are supposedly studying the media, do not read newspapers. The other day, I heard about a newspaper office in Scotland in which the journalists read only The Sun.
It is a fact that young people are less interested in local news than are older consumers. That has been the case for years, and it applies not only to local newspapers but to local television regional news. Young people tend to get their local news through local radio, which does not offer the breadth and depth that one gets from a local newspaper. A high proportion of young people access local news on the internet, but when they are asked about their first source of local news, only a very small percentage name the internet.
The slightly pessimistic answer is that there may not be very much that can be done to attract young people to read local newspapers in large numbers. It is difficult to predict the pattern of return from what we might think of as traditional media as we move forward. For many younger people now, the word "media" refers to social networking sites and mobile telephony. It does not refer to the press, television or radio very much at all, which is worrying for a variety of reasons.
To follow on from that point, there is a policy in France to give people a free newspaper subscription for a year when they reach 18. One of my parliamentary colleagues has suggested something similar in Scotland. If such a scheme—which would obviously have cost implications—were seriously considered, would you favour it? Would it work? Should the paper be a local newspaper, a regional paper—such as The Courier and Advertiser in Dundee or the Ayrshire Post, rather than The Herald, which is a national paper—a Scottish newspaper or a UK newspaper? Should it be a weekly or daily subscription? Should the paper be collected by the person or delivered to them? How would such a policy work?
President Sarkozy's proposal—I do not know whether it has been fully implemented yet—is part of a rather different approach to the press in mainland Europe. Mainland western Europe has always had interventionist policies, such as press subsidies—Sweden spends more than £40 million subsidising weaker newspapers, in the main to ensure that there is pluralism. Historically in Britain, there has been a sense that we must not do that, because it would interfere with the free press. The fact that the proposal has been taken up by one of the deputy convener's colleagues is interesting, because it marks a change in how we talk about the public purse's involvement in the press—there has always been such involvement in broadcasting.
Would you want to exclude England-based papers? Many members probably read The Manchester Guardian, for example.
You are dating yourself. I still talk about The Glasgow Herald.
I try not to talk about The Glasgow Herald or Glasgow corporation buses. People may prefer UK newspapers. The Scottish Government could not be expected to subsidise those, even if they have pseudo-Scottish editions on occasion.
That is a tricky issue. Statistics for the number of newspapers that are sold each morning in Scotland show that there has been a remarkable shift to England-based newspapers with Scottish editions. Now, more than half of the newspapers that are bought in Scotland are papers such as The Scottish Sun and the Scottish versions of The Daily Telegraph, The Times and so on. That is an odd development that I do not fully understand. With devolution, I would have expected movement in the other direction, but that has not happened. It would be difficult to run a scheme that discriminated against English papers. Surely the objective of the scheme would be to get young people reading papers.
Exactly.
I wonder whether encouraging people to read newspapers by distributing them to people in their late teens would be doing so early enough. If, as a society, we are collectively concerned about people's engagement with the media and how that impacts on culture and democracy, we must translate that concern into educational policy, as part of a media literacy policy. To get the habit going, we need to get into schools quite early, as that is the stage at which interest in and engagement with the media is acquired. Kids now acquire habits of engagement with various digital media when they are very young. Given that they are pursuing those interests, I am not sure that handing them The Scotsman or The Herald at a certain point in their teens will work. I do not know whether any society has thought through the issue fully. I suspect that rather more radical action is needed. Short of that, the proposal would be better than nothing, as a proactive way of encouraging newspaper readership.
There is a broader media literacy issue. A great deal is happening in the background in the area of digital participation, in recognition of the fact that people may need to learn more about how to use different forms of digital media. Quite a lot is going on in Scotland; I know that the Scottish Government and Ofcom have had discussions in the area.
I am not sure whether public sector advertising is the main focus of what Governments can do, but it has been a major source of concern for the local paper industry.
The UK and Scottish Governments vary in their approach. I think that the UK Government has more or less told local authorities that they should continue to advertise in local newspapers—and, presumably, in regional newspapers. It just struck me that we must remember the rather successful regional newspapers: The Press and Journal and The Courier in Dundee have done rather better than other newspapers in Scotland, so there are interesting lessons there.
I strongly agree with that point. There is no right for any area of the press to have public sector advertising—in a sense, it is a gift. The investment ought to carry obligations.
We considered such matters as part of our review. There are arguments on both sides. There is pressure on local authorities to make savings, and they are doing so in many ways, including by advertising their jobs on the internet. In our interviews, myjobscotland came up spontaneously as a source of internet advertising for the public sector in Scotland.
We have broken down some of the broadband stats for Scotland. They show that uptake is fairly low in some parts of the country—Glasgow, for example—in comparison with the UK average, and that the picture is not uniform across Scotland. We need to factor in the fact that some rural areas have high levels of broadband uptake but other areas do not.
Last week, we heard an interesting account of what happens when the compulsory advertising of local authority licensing notices is made optional. The advertising stops entirely; no such adverts are placed in the papers. When faced with a choice between public advertising and cost saving, the behaviour of local authorities is clear: they make the cost saving.
It is hard to say which parts people read and which parts they do not read. We know that people buy papers for the adverts—particularly the property, car and job advertisements—but we have no evidence on how many buy a paper to read the notices.
I assume that it would be problematic to determine that, even if one suspects that people do not read everything. If there were a gradual withdrawal of that kind of information, a number of problems would arise. As with the franchise—generally speaking, the vote—people do not always take up the opportunity, but it has to be offered to them. The issue is difficult. I suppose that we are talking about where you draw the line. To take the example of withdrawing licensing information, at which point would you say, "This information is essential, even if that information is not."
One has to look at the context in which people look for information. If someone is looking for a job, they are looking for a job. Other information—for example, what a local authority is up to—is in a different category. Tonight, I will buy two local papers—my area overlaps two newspaper areas—which I will read for the news and skim read for anything else that is of interest, including any planning applications that might affect me. It takes a pleasant 20 minutes to read each paper. Although I am interested in knowing the latest planning applications, half the time I would not seek that information if I had to go and find it. The same is true of many people. The local newspaper offers a package of information, entertainment and education—I think someone else used a phrase like that. People pick up more information than they seek out from them.
Another dilemma that is before us, Mr Hutchison, is public subsidy of profitable papers. Committee members have made it clear that we value local papers immensely. Those local papers may be under threat, but the companies that are behind them are making big money. For example, Trinity Mirror paid substantial sums of money to its top executives at the same time as it laid off dozens of journalists. The real dilemma for people in the public sector is this: we want to retain the journalists' jobs and local papers, but should local authorities not be allowed to make savings? Should public policy be skewed in a way that boosts the profits of big companies?
That is a fair point. Also, as I am sure you are aware, MPs and MSPs could leave themselves open to the argument that local papers are important to them as a channel of communication with the public. As I said earlier, there has to be a quid pro quo. One cannot say that advertising should continue because local papers are good and we are not particularly interested in profit levels. As elected representatives, you are entitled to talk about the relationship between what is, in effect, a partial subsidy—it also has an information value—and how the newspapers discharge their public responsibilities. That takes us back to the crucial issue of the number of journalists whom they employ.
My question follows on from Ken Macintosh's questions. It has been suggested that less than 2 per cent of people get their information through public information notices. How do you respond to that figure, which seems quite low?
Where are the other 98 per cent getting their information? Are they not getting any information?
That is the figure that has been given to us.
James, do you have figures in this area?
No.
There may be instances in which percentages are not important. If the information relates to a contentious planning issue, it might be seen by one or two people who become interested and might lead to an important campaign. I would be reluctant to attach too much importance to percentages—the issue is availability. A small number of people can do a lot with such information. I would be worried if the low percentage to which you refer became a reason for not telling people things. I know that you were not suggesting that but, if one followed that argument, it could become tempting to reduce costs by cutting back on information. The numbers argument is not the most important one in this case.
Last night, I attended a meeting of Saltcoats community council at which the issue was discussed. One member of the council felt strongly about it and was supportive of notices. However, the council as a whole did not support that point of view, because it felt that it disseminated information to people who required it. Not all community councils are as well informed as the one in Saltcoats, which has designated someone to check the local authority website on a frequent basis and to pass information back to it. The community council then lets local people know about what is happening, not only through its website but, where necessary, by other means. Information can be picked up in a number of ways.
The figure is for people who have broadband at home.
Surely people can also go to libraries, job centres and so on.
It would be quite difficult to generalise and quality assure the community council process that you have described—we would be very dependent on the process working well everywhere.
There are many parts of Scotland that do not have community councils.
Last week, we had an interesting discussion about various threats to the newspaper industry. One threat that was clearly identified was local authority publications and community newspapers. Do you have any way of quantifying the importance of that threat?
Any sane person knows that a local authority newspaper is not a newspaper in the normal sense of the term. Such newspapers do not include investigations of councils. They have a lot of interesting information about when the bins will be uplifted over Christmas and so on, but the threat that they pose can be exaggerated. Most of the local authority news sheets that I have seen pose no threat to a good, well-run, lively local newspaper, apart from the fact that they may include a little advertising.
Would you say the same thing about a community-produced newspaper?
I may be less familiar with the current Scottish community newspaper situation than some of my colleagues are. Community newspapers come and go. In the past, there have been excellent examples of community newspapers going into gaps that professional newspapers do not touch—sometimes the laws of libel and contempt of court are factors.
The Newspaper Society performed a survey last year, which found that an increasing number of local councils are launching their own free newspapers. It is a relatively new phenomenon, and it comes from guidance from central Government that local authorities need to improve their communications to local residents. That seems like a good thing, but there have been some high-profile cases of supposedly council-run publications competing with local newspapers for advertising revenue. We found that to involve a very small number of publications, and there are certainly no examples in Scotland. The Newspaper Society survey showed that the vast majority of local councils publish such papers either monthly or quarterly—very few of them publish weekly or fortnightly. It seems that they have a relatively low impact. Some newspaper groups, for example Johnston Press, work with local authorities to distribute their freesheets and use that as a source of revenue. The two types of publication can work in tandem.
Only in greater London have I heard of instances where it has been asserted that council publications might have helped to push paid-for publications to the wall—and that has been contested. It has certainly not happened in Scotland.
Professor Hutchison, you made an interesting remark when you answered a question from the convener about identifying the most local community. If somebody is going to be successful in a local newspaper, they should ensure that they have an empathy with and an understanding of that local community, its defined area and the issues that relate to it. Do you feel that community newspapers are better at understanding that than some local newspapers that deal with a bigger region?
Yes, although we would need to consider specific examples—if they exist. Because community newspapers have, thus far, tended to be small-scale, shoestring operations, they usually think of a defined locality, such as the east end or west end of a city. It may well be that they have a strong sense of that relatively small area. That is true not only of community newspapers, however. For example, newspapers in Shetland and Orkney cover a big geographical spread and yet they seem to have a strong sense of locality.
I asked the question because of the Beauly to Denny line, which is a burning issue in my area. One community paper persistently picked up on it for quite some time. I think that it has had a much better run of things with local people than the traditional local newspaper of the area has had. The perception is that they identify with the issue because it is such a local one that has captured the imagination over that period. The statistics over the past year are interesting: people stopped buying the traditional local newspaper because its coverage of the issue was not as intensive as the community paper's coverage was.
Is that because the community paper came into being for that purpose?
No, but it managed to harness the campaign groups. As you will be aware, straight up the length of the Beauly to Denny development, but particularly in the Stirling and Perthshire area, there has been a focus by some vocal and extremely well-organised groups. That factor gave tremendous credibility to some local community-produced papers.
Are those papers saying, "Here are the arguments for and against the power line", or are they taking a partisan line?
I would not say that the coverage was particularly partisan. However, it is striking that the paper I mentioned chose to go on an issue that is very much at the forefront of local politics. The local paper, which in my opinion is pretty good, covers a wider range of issues, but shopkeepers tell me that the community paper is doing very well because of the Beauly to Denny issue.
That is a most interesting example. The editor of the long-standing paper must now be reflecting on how he positions his paper in the future.
On the job market for journalists, are journalists moving away from traditional local newspapers into wanting to work with community papers? Is there that drift away?
I think that the important market for journalism training is still the traditional, weekly, paid-for newspaper, because it can resource training and give trainee journalists not occasional work but more informed training. An important reason why people should be concerned about the local newspaper industry is that, over the years, the weekly paid-for newspaper has been such a vital training ground for journalists, many of whom move on to national newspapers and sometimes into broadcasting. Indeed, local newspapers are also vital for photographers. One does not want to think about what might happen if that vital sector were to become unavailable to them. In terms of journalism training, those papers are more important than community newspapers are.
Another sector where some training takes place is the community radio sector. About 20 community radio licences have been awarded. I know that those stations rely a lot on volunteers. The numbers should not be exaggerated, but the sector is growing and it must be producing some good experience for young journalists.
Another area of potential public intervention or subsidy is the proposal for independently funded news consortia, which focuses on broadcast media. I am not sure whether the panel members heard our evidence taking last week, during which all the witnesses spoke of their concern about the impact of the proposal on local papers. As they said, it will be good news for the winners and bad news for those who miss out. Do the panel members have a view on whether the new consortia will have an effect on the newspaper industry? I am thinking of the effect not only on newspaper companies but on newspapers themselves.
Ofcom came up with the idea of independently funded news consortia, but the process is now being run by the UK Government. Given that the tendering process is under way, it is difficult for me to give a direct answer to the question.
Given that we are at the pilot stage of the IFNCs, we will have to wait and see what happens next.
The situation is tricky. It is not yet entirely clear how the proposal will be financed in the long term. The argument whether to top slice the BBC licence fee will continue to run. Also, a change of Government could lead to a change in how the argument is put.
I do not want to put Ofcom in a difficult position by asking you to comment on an on-going process, but I have a question about the overlap between local newspapers—I mean local as in town-based newspapers—and regional broadcast media, which was touched on earlier.
No. They perform different roles. A typical regional news programme—or, in Scotland's case, national news programme—focuses on five or six stories. In Scotland they will be from the whole country and in England they will be from a wide region. In any case, the programme will cover five or six stories, whereas a local newspaper may have 15 or 20 stories. Local newspapers always say that their headline stories are nicked by the broadcasters, but there is no evidence that that cannibalises readership. People watch TV. The vast majority of people use their local or regional news programme as their main source of news rather than newspapers, just because more people are watching television at the time and it is easier to access.
In the age of the internet, everyone complains that people take their news. News International is unhappy about the way in which news that they believe they resource is then picked up by internet providers. I would have thought that local newspapers are the least likely to find what they do duplicated in a serious way elsewhere.
Members have talked about local newspapers' impact on and contribution to communities. Last week the committee heard clearly that local newspapers do not have party-political bias—quite the opposite. It was reassuring to hear that.
There must be many examples of politically biased news. Some people argue that there is no such thing as objectivity. Neil Blain and I are weary of the long debate in media studies about whether we can be objective about anything. However, we can be fair—that is what is always said to young journalists.
We should distinguish between such papers and local council newspapers, which are often good at finding much merit in the local council.
They absolutely are.
As part of our review we interviewed most local newspaper proprietors, who told us that political bias is just not good for business. At national level there is considerable competition between papers, so papers can afford to have different political hues, because people will choose the paper that represents their view. At local level, it is increasingly the case that there is only one A4 weekly in the area. A paper that is the only one that serves its community cannot afford to be politically biased one way or the other.
It has become apparent to me that newspapers are quite clever at not being politically biased, in some cases. However, in my role as a local politician I am irked when papers omit one side of a story or even the whole story, because it does not chime with whoever is in control of the local authority or the political views of individuals who are involved. A big concern of mine is that local newspapers damage local democracy by omitting information that people need if they are to be able to make up their minds on an issue.
That would always be wrong. I would have thought that in such situations an elected representative would have some kind of redress, perhaps by writing a letter to the relevant editor.
It would not be published.
Really? I would love to know which newspapers you are talking about—you might not want to talk about that in open session. I do not think that we can make the case that every local newspaper in Scotland behaves in that way.
You talked about two newspapers that you buy, which come out in my constituency. You live in West Kilbride, which is the battleground of the Largs & Millport Weekly News and the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald. Surely you have noticed a significant difference between those papers in the context of what is reported. I am talking about the lack of content in one of those papers.
I am glad that you raised that example, because I would not have wanted to cite it. The interesting thing about the two papers that you cite is that they are owned by the same company and yet they have different journalistic mixes. That takes us back to the issue of how to run a lively newspaper. One of those newspapers seems more concerned to report lurid crime—although there might be a lot of lurid crime in the area—whereas the other seems to have a somewhat wider agenda. That might come down to the editor, the editorial policy of the company or the area. To me, that contrast raises interesting questions about what makes local newspapers different from one another.
We all agree that getting consensus on what is objective in the media is pretty much impossible. Nationally, we usually answer the question by saying that there is a plurality of voices. At that level, many newspapers are partisan and therefore we look for a balance, with more than one broadcaster, radio station and newspaper, although we do not always achieve that balance. At the local level, the member's question takes on a different emphasis, because we talk about being grateful for the survival of perhaps one paid-for newspaper. The difficulty is that there is one voice at the local level, and it is difficult to get a variety of voices. I suspect that the answer to the member's question has to do with things such as energetic lobbying, rebuttal and argument, but the situation is not perfectible and it never will be.
The broadcasting code does not cover newspapers, but it contains a requirement for due impartiality. There is no scientific formula for impartiality, but broadcasters must be impartial, dependent on issues such as the story and the programme that it appears in. There are rules covering broadcasting.
Aye, right.
My question moves on nicely from Professor Blain's comment about one voice. I understand that Ofcom cannot comment, but its proposal recommends a restriction to prevent one person—that one voice—from dominating the news agenda across radio, local newspapers and channel 3 TV. What are your views on the local radio and cross-media ownership rules?
I have a contrary view to that of Ofcom. It seems to me that the two-out-of-three proposal is a little flawed in the Scottish context. Two out of three might make sense in, say, Canada, where the regulatory body, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, has issued just such a rule, although it is not retrospective. That makes sense because a person in Calgary might own a television station, a radio station and a newspaper, which would be unacceptable. The two-out-of-three rule makes sense there, because all those media are specific to Calgary.
That is our present recommendation to the secretary of state. Professor Hutchison is right that in many parts of the UK newspapers already own radio stations. We had to reach a balance between what consumers felt and what the industry needed, which was less regulation. On the industry side, there are already rules that restrict anti-competitive mergers—basically, the merger regime that is managed by the Office of Fair Trading. The media ownership rules are an extra layer of regulation on top of that, which does not feel as though it serves the appropriate purpose in an environment in which more and more people use the internet.
Michael Johnston urged a more pragmatic approach, and I know that Professor Hutchison has given specific examples. Does anyone else have any other examples of what that pragmatic approach would be?
I think that Michael Johnston might mean the opportunity to acquire more properties. Is that an unfair assumption?
He said that the rules were too narrowly defined.
What are the obstacles to effective competition and thriving local newspaper businesses? That is one of the questions that we have to answer. It is very unlikely that we will see big mergers or acquisitions in the next two years because most of the big newspaper groups are heavily in debt in the middle of an economic recession. However, we might see title swaps, in which a particular newspaper group might want to swap titles with another newspaper group, for example, to get better access to printing presses and thereby make economies.
The argument that the proprietors of Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror, which owns Scottish and Universal Newspapers, will make about deregulation has a basis; it is not necessarily a bad argument. There is a tension between different kinds of need. The argument that certain press outlets will not survive without such deregulation is not necessarily a bad economic argument. It is a question of what comes out at the other end in terms of journalism, editorial standards and local commitment; it is a balancing act.
Yes. One of my colleagues will come on to that very topic soon. Thank you.
Public interest is what matters; it is not just about the commercial interests of the organisations concerned but about the public interest and serving democracy.
I could not agree more.
Similar to last week's meeting, this morning's discussion has identified the importance of properly trained local journalists who can undertake more investigative work and dedicate more time to local stories and campaigns. In last week's evidence, however, there was recognition that there are threats to that, and we have seen job cuts in some parts of the sector. Concern was also expressed that graduates are finding it more difficult to find places at local newspapers. Martin Boyle from Cardonald College spoke of the danger of a democratic deficit being created. In a way, that ties in to Christina McKelvie's comments and concerns about how newspapers are able to report stories.
That takes us back to our earlier discussion of whether local authority advertising should continue to be in local newspapers. It is and always has been tricky for politicians to get involved in that. However, if the committee were to decide to recommend to the Scottish Government that such advertising should continue to be placed in local papers, there must be some way of talking about commitments on journalistic resources.
That brings us back to new media and new trends. Not only journalism graduates but journalists, and sometimes quite experienced journalists, are going into two areas: some are going into more entertainment-based forms of journalism, such as magazine journalism, for example. There is information in such journalism as well, but it is different from the kind of information that we get in local newspapers. The other area is public relations. It is a question of sustaining the destination in order that a significant number of journalists can get news journalism training and reporting training on local newspapers—that is the difficulty. I am not particularly pessimistic about careers for journalists at the moment although, as in every area of higher education provision, we have constantly to guard against oversupply and so adjust the provision.
As you say, there are different options—different paths to pursue—for younger people who go into journalism or media studies. Do they have the same understanding as previous generations of the expectations for local journalism?
It is self-selecting, but we find that students who come to do media courses and want particularly to study journalism tend to be highly media literate and enthusiastic. Journalists are interesting graduates because they tend to know what they want to do much earlier than others do. We have to pitch higher education provision in the universities for people who do not necessarily know until they get to the third or fourth year of a university course what they want to do—apart from to graduate, which is usually their foundational aim.
We have a responsibility not to allow too many young people to delude themselves into thinking that, if they do these courses, they will soon be presenting "Newsnight". The universities and colleges have not thought enough about that problem. In the media studies course for which I was responsible for many years, we always told people that the course would take them not into the media but into marketing, advertising and public relations. Neil Blain will bear that out, because he was with us at the time.
Yes.
Higher education must not give the impression that there are lots of well-paid jobs: starting salaries in the local press are not terrifically high. A person who has done an undergraduate degree in journalism will have debts. If that person has done an undergraduate degree in a different subject, then a postgraduate degree in journalism, he or she will have even bigger debts, so going into journalism can be financially challenging. I have seen it argued quite a lot in the south that the postgraduate course is now open only to wealthy people because of the structure that we have. A remarkably high proportion of the people who are able to do an undergraduate course in history or science and then a postgraduate course that takes them into journalism come from moneyed backgrounds, so we are in danger of narrowing the range of people who end up as journalists. James Thickett may have come across the research to which I refer; it is worth looking at.
I return to the broader impact of local newspapers on culture and local identity. Last week we heard about the role of local correspondents. What contribution do local newspapers make to communities' identity and culture?
Their contribution is enormous. Continuity and stability are important. A community newspaper—even a recently arrived one—can campaign effectively on a single issue, but that is not quite the same thing as a newspaper that has been around in the community for a long time, which has a local and cultural memory. An editor who has been in post for a long time can often become a significant member of the local community. Local newspapers may have photographic and all sorts of other archives, so they are part of local history.
I was struck by how many of the around 20 papers that I read over the weekend are doing historical work and using their archives to talk about what happened in the past. They are doing genuine archival work; they are not just reporting that 100 years ago someone was arrested for something, but are telling the story of the community. Wherever I go in Britain, one of the first things I do is buy the local paper. I do not suppose that I am atypical in that. If you want quickly to get a sense of what is happening somewhere—what people are concerned about or what is on at the pictures or the theatre—you go to the local paper.
That is right. Many journalistic commentators have refused to shed tears over the disappearance of, for example, certain free sheets that do not operate in that area—although it is a bit harsh when people have lost their jobs. On the other hand, there are such newspapers and the market likes them. Some of them may have lost some circulation and revenue, but they are, happily, the ones that are more likely to survive.
The point about historic documentation and the stories that local newspapers can tell was interesting. Is that an avenue that local papers could perhaps consider in order to broaden their audience—making people more aware of how valuable an historic resource they are?
Local newspapers are working quite hard at that. If circulation is falling and the paper is losing revenue, that is exactly the sort of outreach activity in which they engage. There are signs of that happening and I think that you will see more of it. Only a very particular kind of newspaper is equipped to do it, but, as David Hutchison said, those are the ones that we admire and which probably have the highest value.
Is there evidence that it is the papers that are chain-owned that can do that or is it more likely to be the independent papers that do it?
That question is a bit difficult. I will use as an example the Hamilton Advertiser and some of the others that used to be George Outram newspapers in Lanarkshire and elsewhere, and which became owned by Scottish and Universal Newspapers Limited and by Trinity Mirror plc. If you saw any change in the newspapers over time—in 1970 the Hamilton Advertiser had a circulation of 48,000, which I think was the highest paid-for circulation at that time in Scotland—it would be difficult to know to what you would attribute that. I would, given that there are so many other factors, be reluctant to say that a newspaper's changing over 20 or 30 years would be the result of its being owned by a large chain. We could point to newspapers that have become part of fairly large chains that live up in good part to the values that we have been talking about as well as papers that are independent or are owned by a smaller group. The short answer is that it is not inimical to these kinds of values that the paper be owned by a large chain. The situation varies.
Academics say, for example, that there is scope for further research—perhaps one of us should get a PhD student to do it—to examine variations in circulation, content and ownership. That would be an interesting project.
In your academic research, have you noticed any negative impacts on communities that have lost newspapers? We have been told that that is perhaps not such an issue in Scotland, but you might know of places elsewhere where such a loss has been a devastating blow to the community.
In the UK, it is relatively hard to find examples—James Thickett may know of some—where there has not been an alternative of some kind in the community.
There are one or two isolated examples. One that comes to mind is Donnington, which lost its local newspaper; it had a circulation of 1,200. We are not finding that newspapers are closing down. The ones that are closing down tend to be free sheets, of which there was a huge explosion during the 1990s. Very few paid-for weekly papers have closed down in the past year, but there has been more consolidation; it is less likely that there will be two or three competing paid-for papers in one area. As I said, the market tends to be moving towards a single local paper being the only paper available in an area. That is driven by the economics of the industry—demand does not exist for two or three papers with different owners.
On the other hand—and in case we sound over-optimistic about the situation—the loss of a newspaper is an experience that we could imagine having in the relatively near future. If we look at the trends for press consumption generally and slot local newspaper consumption into that, we would probably be entitled to have a fairly pessimistic view of how the situation might develop. It would be useful to start imagining such a scenario and to work out ways to forestall it, because when you lose such a resource it is all but impossible to get it back.
It may be worth looking at what the committee's colleagues in the National Assembly for Wales are exploring. Trinity Mirror has closed papers in Wales, but there is talk about making public funds available there to start so-called community papers. The committee may find itself discussing that possibility a few years from now.
I am interested in something that we discussed at last week's meeting, much of which was based on David Hutchison's written submission. It is about how newspapers that cover niche markets seem to have done particularly well in the recession. That is maybe not just because they can often be very lively even in geographically isolated areas, but because they are specific to such areas. David Hutchison talked about the two newspapers that he buys in West Kilbride, one of which covers an area that has maybe 50,000 or 60,000 people, while the other covers an area with only about 15,000 people. The level of saturation and penetration of one is clearly a lot higher than that of the other. Arran, which has the same population as West Kilbride and Seamill, has a very health local newspaper.
It is relatively easy to editionise a paper's coverage. One of the papers that Kenneth Gibson cited covers a very big area that goes right into central Ayrshire to the Garnet valley and so on. The other has a much more distinct area that has quite a strong sense of being a discrete area. I do not think that we are in a situation in which any local newspapers are likely to be established in the near future. I do not have the figures, but there must be a figure below which a paper must not drop if it is to be viable and do all the things that we all agree ought to be done by a local paper.
I would imagine that community and identity in Lanarkshire continue quite strongly.
I point out that there are huge differences between North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire.
What we can predict is that existing newspapers that are mapped on to communities, particularly those away from the central belt, will have a better chance of survival. It is no accident that as far as the big regionals and nationals are concerned The Press and Journal in Aberdeen has a considerably larger circulation than The Scotsman and The Herald; indeed, as a ballpark figure, the P and J sells roughly the same as those two papers put together. That is partly because parts of Scotland people feel a bit marginalised when it comes to news and information coverage—doubly so, in fact, in that they feel not only that they are not getting any attention from the Scottish media in the central belt but that they are simply off the planet as far as the London media are concerned.
The Press and Journal in Aberdeen has the biggest circulation of any local newspaper in Britain, and Dundee's The Courier is not far behind. Members might not know that the two papers, even although they are 70 or 80 miles apart, share the same printing press. Where single owners are able to create an economic situation in which several newspapers share the same press—and, in many cases, the same head office—and where journalists work from home or remotely instead of working out of a local office in their own small town, the running of smaller-circulation newspapers becomes more cost effective than ever. Such moves have been shown to work in practice, and I am quite optimistic about them.
Someone should point out, however, that if we described The Press and Journal and The Courier as local papers, we would get our heads in our hands.
I did see you wince at that comment.
We should also highlight the fact that both papers have been very successful and have managed to weather the recession probably better than any other newspaper, partly because they share the same printing press.
We have not talked about the web in a wee while. Are you concerned about the way in which news is displayed on the web? People tell me that they would rather look at newspapers on the web than buy them, because they get not only the content but other unique stories that proprietors have clearly put on to attract them. Are such moves self-destructive to the industry? Do they undermine the value of news as a commodity for which people should pay? I know, of course, that Johnston Press is seeing how it might be able to push a rock back up the hill by asking people to begin to pay for accessing its papers on the internet. What can newspapers do about their websites to ensure that they do not undermine their printed circulation?
This is a very difficult issue to resolve. Kenneth Gibson is right to suggest that, at one level, it appears that it is self-destructive to put a lot of information on the internet. However, because of the change in media use, newspapers have no choice, and no one has really found an answer to the problem that, by doing so, they appear to contribute to their own decline.
It is easy to say, "This should never have been allowed to happen." In a competitive market situation, however, it was bound to happen. The New York Times tried to hold the line, but I can now read it every morning for nothing. That is nonsense—I should be paying something. I personally hope that Mr Murdoch's company succeeds in imposing or building pay walls, and that the Johnston Press experiment is successful. People should not get the impression that journalism can be provided for nothing, or just on the back of advertising. That is not an acceptable position—although people have now been given to understand that it is. We might even argue that having a paper such as Metro is not a very bright idea for the development of newspapers. We are where we are, however.
That is the point that I was making. I have spoken to some editors in Johnston Press about this. Surely you want the web to encourage people to buy the newspaper to find out what else is happening in their area, rather than do the exact opposite.
Absolutely.
If people can get some of the content on the web, it is a complete discouragement to purchase.
The suggestion might have been that, by casting about between and among newspapers, radio programmes and some television programmes, people might have a better chance.
Of finding one that is less hostile than others.
I am not suggesting that finding one is inevitable.
Mr Gibson wanted to know which newspaper we could recommend. Neil Blain and I edited a book a couple of years ago, in which there is an interesting essay by a chap called Michael Russell about the way in which political parties and newspapers have interacted in Scotland of late. That is by the by.
In our review we looked not just at local newspapers but at the local media as a whole. We found that all the predictors are that in the future the availability of local media will be greater than it has ever been, because it will be far cheaper to produce content—particularly news—at local level, and to distribute it to people who want it, whether that is done through the internet, community newspapers or community radio. There is much evidence that ultra-local content is thriving in the United Kingdom. That is certainly what is happening in the US.
I apologise for missing the beginning of the discussion—I apologise even more if I am about to ask a question that has already been asked.
No, apart from crime and sport. Those are the two that I would mention.
Companies have done some research on that, I think, but I know of no recent academic study that looks specifically at local papers. Ofcom might have done some work on that. It would be well worth doing.
It sounds like a PhD.
We did some work on why people buy their local paper. When we asked people about that, news, weather and local information came out as the three big factors.
Did that work distinguish between different kinds of news?
We just had a category called local news.
I just wondered, because most of us would agree that sport is an important part of the sense of community and, obviously, impartiality is as important in sport as it is in politics.
There is less of it, though, interestingly.
I can only speak about the Evening News, but there is a lot less of it there.
That concludes our questions to witnesses. Thank you for your attendance at committee.
Meeting continued in private until 13:10.