Sad demise of The Scotsman as Johnston Press replaces its boss

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2013/jan/16/the-scotsman-johnston-press

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Johnston Press has announced the departure of Andrew Richardson, managing director of the company's Scottish operation since last February. He is to be replaced by Stuart Birkett. Richardson had previously been in charge of the division that runs The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening News.

His departure is yet another sign of The Scotsman's decline. The once-proud paper has been humbled by a succession of strategic changes of direction by its most recent owners.

Its sombre history is detailed in the latest issue of the British Journalism Review (BJR) in an article by Arthur MacMillan, The sad decline of The Scotsman. And his analysis also charts the parallel decline of Johnston Press itself.

He first tells of the "tumultuous decade under the ownership of Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay," which began in 1995 when the brothers acquired The Scotsman from the Thomson group for £85m.

They sold it in 2005 to Johnston Press (JP) for £160m - a sum widely regarded as far too generous. The deal was negotiated by JP's then chief executive, Tim Bowdler, who was hailed at the time as the king of the regional newspaper industry.

But the king, according to MacMillan's article, had no idea about how to rule The Scotsman. He tells of the mismatch between JP's "life is local" slogan and the national requirements of The Scotsman.

He writes that after seven years of JP ownership, "the business has been sweated to stagnation. The website is a shadow of its former self. Resources have been slashed and hundreds of employees sacked. The Scotsman currently averages around 30,000 sales on weekdays."

He goes on to quote a former Scotsman executive as saying after a meeting with Bowdler: "It was apparent to me, almost instantly, that they did not know what they had bought and were completely out of their depth… They screwed it up within about three months."

MacMillan, now based in Washington as news editor for Agence France-Presse (AFP), witnessed the problems from the inside during his stint as education correspondent at Scotland on Sunday.

He also quotes a former Scotsman editor, John McGurk, as saying: "They [JP] did not care about producing quality at all. They only cared about producing profit."

Bowdler retired in 2008, giving way to John Fry, from the Archant group, who lasted just over two years. Now the task of turning the company around has fallen to Ashley Highfield, who has no newspaper experience.

That, says MacMillan, may be a good thing, noting: "Unlike his predecessors, he has gone on record to say that Johnston Press did fail to invest in content at its stable of around 250 newspapers, a process that self-evidently speeded the company's demise."

"The burning question at The Scotsman," writes MacMillan, "is how long can it and its sister newspapers last?"

<em>His article is up on the BJR website</em> here. <em>Other source:</em> HoldTheFrontPage