Moves afoot to rescue the Scotsman

The Sunday Times is reporting attempt by a business consortium to rescue the Scotsman from the grip of Johnston Press.

According to the paper

Talks have taken place in recent weeks but the two sides are believed to be a long way apart on price. Industry sources say Johnston is holding out for about £40m for The Scotsman, which it bought from the Barclay brothers for £160m in 2005.

adding that

Johnston’s acquisition of The Scotsman was seen as the crowning glory of a buying spree that had taken the company from a family-run player to one of the country’s largest regional publishers in barely a decade.
In reality, it was one of several deals too far for the group, which is locked in talks with lenders to reset the borrowing terms on £450m of debt by August 31.

Stewart Kirkpatrick on why Scotland needs its local press

I missed the comments yesterday of ,Stewart Kirkpatrick former editor of the scotsman.com website in the Independent.

Wherever you take your starting point, it is impossible to identify a society in which the scrutiny of a free and diverse newspaper press has not been vital to the development and success of representative democracy. They are so inextricably linked it is alarming to contemplate the possibility of one trying to function without the other.

Scotland he claims is unique in the UK having a relatively new devolved administration

Devolved Scotland is a new and fragile polity in which debate takes place within a narrow consensus. Its electoral system privileges party over electorate and the ruling elite is self-selecting and jealous of its privileges. The country's broadcasters are ill equipped to fill the vacuum left by its failing newspapers. Broadcasters can never do the job of a free press. At their best they provide balanced, informative news. It is to newspapers that citizens must turn for investigation, exposure and crusading zeal.

Sour grapes over the Scotsman's web figures perhaps?

A little snippet courtesy of Roy Greenslade who notes some sour grapes? from the former Editor of the Scotsman's website who notes that sinec Johnson Press revamped the site hits have fallen dramatically.

I also knew that traffic would tank. I warned Tim Bowlder, the JP chief executive, of this face to face saying the JP redesign would lose “millions of page views and hundreds of thousands of users”. My warning was ignored and a JP apparatchik later explained that I had not understood how good their plans were.
Well, we can finally see how good their plans were. Audited traffic figures for scotsman.com have finally escaped into the light of day. According to ABCe, the site I edited for seven years now gets about 2 million unique users a month.
That’s about half of the traffic it received in 2007. That’s the lowest audited traffic scotsman.com has had since January 2004.

When off the record means on the record

Or is it the other way around and does this show the differences between journalism on either side of the Atlantic?

One of Barack Obama's advisors is forced to resign over remarks made to the Scotsman newspaper in an interview.Samantha Powers was quoted as saying that Hillary Clinton was a "monster".

The comments given in an on the record interview to Gerri Peev.

The story as told by Fraser Nelson is as follows

It was an on-the-record interview but after Powers misspoke she instructed Peev “that’s off the record”. Peev had made no such agreement, and ran with the story

After the remarks were picked up by US websites the Scotsman reports that

Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who made the remark, said: "With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an adviser to the Obama campaign. I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months."

Kirsty McLuckie writing in the paper thinks it was justified in publishing the comments

SOME say it is unfair to have quoted the member of Barack Obama's campaign team who blurted out "Hillary Clinton is a monster" to a Scotsman journalist and immediately claimed it as off the record as well as off the cuff. But don't believe that anyone who is anywhere near a presidential hopeful at this stage in the game ever says anything that isn't carefully scripted. Even the denial that it was ever said will have been worked on by a team of advisers before the off-the-cuff

But was the paper right or should it have used its discretion?

The affair has also shown up the difference between UK and US journalism.Iain Martin says the affair shows that

American hacks are often too polite and trusting of politicians' motives. Only this late in the race for the nomination is the press asking serious questions of Obama

For him the differences are that on the one hand

The Americans, who have a knock-about tradition from the last century which they like to forget, take pride in having constructed a full-blown 'profession', equal to the law and medicine, with academic posts, a literature on the subject and very self-important prize ceremonies. Fine, but I blame Watergate.

Whilst on this side of the pond

the Brits as a breed have tended to be more rumbustious, cheekier, a little more inquisitive and wary of the powerful. There are excesses, but overall the sense is of British journalism being noisier and more vibrant. Competition is fierce, which until the age of the internet it was not in the US. And that might be the problem.