There was a time when the local newspaper was practically an institution.
It told you who had been elected, who had been arrested, which roads were closing and what the council was spending your money on. It celebrated the ordinary, scrutinised the powerful and occasionally printed a photograph of someone receiving an oversized cheque.
Not always glamorous journalism. But important journalism nonetheless.
Today, the picture is rather different.
Local newsrooms have been hollowed out, journalists are expected to produce more with less, and newspapers that once had a distinctive identity increasingly operate within sprawling media groups.
The result is a peculiar situation: Scotland can have plenty of newspapers without necessarily having enough journalism.
And that distinction matters.
Who owns the news?
When I began researching my dissertation, Newsman’s Blues, I wanted to understand how media ownership affected the quality and diversity of journalism in Scotland.
The question sounds straightforward enough. Does it matter who owns your newspaper?
Well, yes. But perhaps not in the way you might expect.
Scotland’s newspaper industry has experienced significant consolidation. Titles that were once independently owned have become part of larger publishing groups, with resources, technology and sometimes editorial functions shared across multiple publications.
There are perfectly understandable commercial reasons for this.
Newspapers are expensive to produce. Advertising revenue has migrated online, print circulation has declined, and the economics of journalism have become increasingly unforgiving.
Sharing resources can help newspapers survive.
But survival and success are not necessarily the same thing.
A newspaper might still appear on a newsstand or publish dozens of stories online every day. That doesn’t automatically mean it has the resources to investigate a local authority, scrutinise a planning decision or spend weeks pursuing a story that matters to its readers.
A publication can remain alive while the journalism that once defined it gradually disappears.
The illusion of choice
Walk into a newsagent and you might find several newspapers offering different mastheads, editorial positions and audiences.
On the surface, that’s diversity.
But the number of titles available tells us surprisingly little about the range of journalism being produced.
If publications share reporting resources, rely heavily on the same information or prioritise stories that generate the greatest number of clicks, their coverage can begin to look remarkably similar.
That doesn’t mean journalists have surrendered their independence.
Indeed, one of the more interesting findings from my research was that concentrated ownership does not automatically eliminate editorial diversity or independence.
Good journalism can and does emerge from large media organisations.
The problem is more complicated than a simple argument about corporate ownership.
It’s about the conditions in which journalism is produced.
How many reporters are available? How much time can they devote to a story? Are they encouraged to investigate, or expected to fill an increasingly demanding publishing schedule?
You can employ excellent journalists and still create an environment in which excellent journalism becomes difficult.
A newspaper isn’t the same as a newsroom
One of the concepts I explored was the idea of a news desert.
Traditionally, the term describes a community with little or no access to local news.
It’s a useful concept, but I think it needs to go further.
Imagine two Scottish towns.
The first has lost its local newspaper altogether.
The second still has one, complete with a website, social media accounts and a recognisable masthead.
At first glance, the second town appears better served.
But what if its newspaper no longer has a dedicated reporter attending council meetings? What if much of its content consists of rewritten announcements, syndicated material and stories produced elsewhere?
Does that community genuinely have access to meaningful local journalism?
Or does it simply have access to something that looks like a newspaper?
A news desert shouldn’t be defined solely by the absence of news outlets. It should also account for the absence of quality journalism.
That, for me, was one of the most important conclusions to emerge from the research.
Because the existence of a newspaper tells us very little about its ability to hold power to account.
The independents offering another way
Thankfully, the story isn’t entirely one of decline.
Independent and digital-first publishers have demonstrated that journalism doesn’t necessarily require the traditional newspaper business model.
In Scotland, investigative outlets such as The Ferret have shown how a publication can build its identity around a particular kind of reporting rather than attempting to replicate every function of a conventional newspaper.
Other specialist and community-focused outlets have demonstrated the potential of serving audiences whose interests are not always reflected in mainstream coverage.
These models are not without their difficulties.
Funding investigative journalism is hard. Building a sustainable audience takes time. Independence from a large publisher doesn’t magically solve the problem of paying journalists.
But they offer an important reminder.
The future of journalism need not look exactly like its past.
And perhaps that’s something the industry should embrace rather than resist.
The stories that never get written
There’s another problem with the decline of local journalism, and it’s one that’s difficult to measure.
We can count newspaper closures.
We can track circulation figures.
We can examine the number of journalists employed by a publishing company.
What we cannot easily count are the stories that never get written.
The council decision that nobody questions.
The local scandal that never reaches the public.
The community campaign that struggles for attention because there is nobody left to cover it.
The ordinary people whose experiences never become part of the public record.
These absences rarely make headlines.
Why would they? There’s nobody there to write them.
Yet they may represent the most significant cost of journalism’s decline.
Local reporting isn’t simply a commercial product. It’s part of the infrastructure of a functioning democracy.
When it disappears, something more important than a newspaper disappears with it.
What happens next?
I don’t believe the solution is simply to recreate the newspaper industry of 30 years ago.
The economics have changed. Audiences have changed. The ways people consume information have changed.
And nostalgia, however comforting, isn’t a business model.
But neither should we accept a future in which the survival of a masthead is mistaken for the survival of journalism.
We need to think more seriously about what makes a community well informed.
That means looking beyond the number of newspapers still in circulation and asking harder questions about the quality, originality and public value of the reporting they produce.
It means recognising the contribution of independent publishers while acknowledging the difficulties they face.
And it means remembering that journalism’s purpose extends beyond generating traffic, selling advertising or filling pages.
My dissertation began with a question about who owns Scotland’s news.
By the end, I was left thinking about something rather more fundamental.
What good is having a newspaper if nobody is left to ask the difficult questions?
Perhaps that’s the question Scotland’s media industry should be asking itself.