The Scottish newspaper industry in the digital era

Abstract

This article looks at the opportunities for and challenges to the national press in Scotland in the digital media era. Based on input from interviews with Scottish newspaper editors and managers and on reports about the current state of the industry, it explores how the changes that affect the press globally have impacted the Scottish market and how newspaper companies have reacted to them so far. It discusses the impact of the competition for readership and advertising in a small market with many players, the hope that the industry has placed in paywalls and portable digital devices, and argues that, despite widespread optimism among its members that the industry will successfully survive into the future, the business model that will ensure this survival is yet to be established.

‘Team GB’ or ‘Team Scotland’? Media representations of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Scottishness’ at London 2012 and Glasgow 2014

“…Whilst the exclusion of the Daily Record precludes the opportunity to further explore the impact of their non-committal editorial stance on their representations of Scottishness and Britishness during these 'media events', it is worth briefly noting that this stance can be attributed to commercial considerations and the potential risk of alienating a significant proportion of their readership by adopting either pro-union or pro-independence position (Dekavalla, 2015(Dekavalla, , 2016. Indeed, a similar non-aligned stance was adopted by the Daily Record's direct tabloid competitor The Scottish Sun which suggests that the commercial implications of the respective publications editorial positions may be worth further analysis in future academic studies.…”

Scottish newspapers and the crisis of the print press: journalistic autonomy and digital transition in a liberal media system

“…Tables 1 and 2 show that both categories of newspapers have lost a very large part of their circulations over the last fifteen years. As explained previously, this is part of an international trend, though in Scotland the competition has been fiercer due to the large number of players in the market for the size of the population (McNair et al, 2010, Dekavalla, 2015. The indigenous Scottish press was established in the 17 th and 18 th centuries and the titles mentioned above changed ownership several times in their history (Hutchison, 2008).…”

“…All this changed gradually with the introduction of competition from an increasing number of platforms. In the UK, newspapers reached a peak in their sales in the 1950s, and thereafter have been losing readers, as a result of competition initially with television, and then, at a much more accelerated pace, with online media (Dekavalla, 2015). The decline of the press is a pattern that affects most Western markets and is not unique to Scotland or Europe.…”

Press and the digital revolution: the challenges of the Portuguese market

“…Newspapers have been a source of valuable information about public and social affairs, that support the informed political decisions of citizens and have provided meaningful investigation on the concentration of power by various institutions (Schudson, 2008). Newspapers have been proven to turn local politics more vibrant (Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido, 2009) and have been closely associated with the support of national and cultural identities (Dekavalla, 2015). With technology fostering the increasing fragmentation of audiences and the dispersal of advertising revenues to other platforms, newspapers are faced with new actors disputing their role to inform, to gather audiences and to provide fora for civic debate.…”

“…Even though the issue of smallness is not frequent, it has not been absent from the scientific concerns that have pointed out some possible relevant outcomes of the lack of resources and strong markets (Puppis et al, 2009;Schlesinger & Benchimol, 2015). Small markets are not a unique condition of small states and smallness has also been studied in regard to the local structure of the newspaper business in the USA stressing its bonds to the community (Picard, 2008), to the specific identity of a given community (Dekavalla, 2015) or in regard to different linguistic communities within the same state (Prado, 2015).…”