Falling newspaper sales, job cuts, and advertising in free fall. Peter John Meiklem looks back on a difficult year.
BY PETER JOHN MEIKLEM
WITH the exception of the good people behind Gaelic television station BBC Alba, there will be few Scottish media watchers who will look back on 2008 with any great fondness.
ITV director of television Peter Fincham may have urged this year's television festival crowd in Edinburgh to celebrate television's "positive" side, but 2008 was another year defined by scandal. From John Sergeant's Strictly Come Dancing departure to Sachsgate, it was another bad year for TV's PR teams.
North of the Border, as the first analogue transmitter was turned off in Selkirk on November 6, the fight for the digital future was already well under way. The Scottish Broadcasting Commission (see below) knocked the BBC about a bit and SMG - which announced a rebranding to STV plc in June - found itself outraged by ITV chairman Michael Grade's desire to turn ITV into a UK brand at its expense.
In response to the longstanding criticisms over the amount of money it spends in Scotland making network programmes, the BBC first announced the appointment of a commissioning executive to be based in Pacific Quay - three years after originally making the pledge - then said key BBC brands such as The Weakest Link and Question Time would be made in Scotland.
Facing a £150 million black hole in its UK funding, Channel 4 was even less keen to spend more in Scotland. But the broadcaster did blaze a new-media trail, committing around £8 m of Scottish money - part of a £50m UK war chest - to digital venture capital fund 4IP, which aims to support online "innovators" and "troublemakers". C4 ended the year with privatisation worries, with a merger with BBC Worldwide the most likely government option at the time of writing.
Easily the winner of the best nibbles of the year award, the long-awaited launch of BBC Alba on a windy September night in Edinburgh saw Scotland's newest digital channel spring to life in some style with harps, Runrig covers and a little bit of Elvis.
For newspapers, there was no such joie de vivre. Even the spectacle of global capitalism staggering against the ropes wasn't enough to halt the steady newspaper circulation declines.
BBC Scotland commissioned former Scotsman editor John McGurk to investigate the issue. His depressing prognosis - that Scottish papers could have as little as 10 years left - was enough to bring howls of derision from current editors and bad-tempered accusations of doom-mongering in May.
But if falling circulation was the first rider of McGurk's Scottish newspaper apocalypse, the other three were not long to catch up. A sharp decline in the advertising market; continuing reader migration online; and the large debts built up by some publishers placed immense strain on the traditional print business model throughout 2008.
The scale of Johnston Press's troubles became fully apparent in July when its £700m debts forced it to announce a one-for-one rights issue and the sale of 20% of the business to Malaysian billionaire T Ananda Krishnan.
For the first time in its 250-year history, the Johnston family were no longer the largest shareholders, but there was more to come in November when the company's share price plunged as fears over the refinancing of debt took hold. The city valued the company at only £45m when share price was at its lowest, a fraction of the billion-pound-plus valuations of the recent past, although it has now rallied to around £80m. It was a similar story for Daily Record owner Trinity Mirror; its mid-November share price fell to 25p, valuing the company at just £64m. This gave national newspapers managing director Mark Hollinshead the worst possible start to his promotion from running the Record and Mail papers, which came despite the Record's failure to narrow the sales gap with The Scottish Sun.
For staff at the Record and Mail, as well as various other Scottish national titles, the economic uncertainty had a depressingly certain conclusion: further redundancies. At the time of writing most major titles are looking to shed staff.
But is was new Herald group editor-in-chief Donald Martin - who replaced Charles McGhee in December - who dominated the headlines. As part of a plan to create a 24/7 digital newsroom, Martin told the entire staff of the Evening Times, Sunday Herald and Herald of drastic changes ahead, later confirming all staff were at risk of losing their jobs and were invited to apply for new posts within a slimmed-down cross-title structure.
One piece of positive news came from an unexpected quarter: broadcasting watchdog the BBC Trust. The Trust said no to BBC plans to expand the corporation's local video content, accepting publishers' arguments that the expansion constituted a unfair state-sponsored foray into local publishers' turf.
In magazines, Dundee music specialist Clash conjured up the green-eyed monster when managing director John O'Rourke announced a £230,000 grant from Scottish Enterprise. The print version of the mag went on to win Scottish magazine of the year at PPA magazine awards. Elsewhere in magazines, the Big Issue in Scotland celebrated 15 years on the streets.
For new media it was a mixed bag: online audiences continued to swell but concerns over properly monetising them continued to dominate. The BBC's iPlayer blossomed but it was a different story for Project Kangaroo, the commercial on-demand partnership between the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV that was supposed to launch in the summer. It was delayed by management, then eventually further stalled by a Competition Commission ruling in early December.
As radio struggled with the same bearish advertising market as everyone else, companies fought to cut costs. Bauer scrapped 11 local evening shows, launching a Scotland-wide show in their place.
After Xfm Scotland's managers were branded "morons" by former presenter Dominik Diamond, the station was relaunched as dance station Galaxy by new owner Global Radio after it swallowed up GCap Media in the £375m radio deal of the year.
It was a sadder story on the other side of the country where the prospect of a last-minute management buyout from station director Matt Allitt failed to save Edinburgh's talk107. Earlier in the year owner UTV sacked eight presenters and producers in a desperate bid to force the station upmarket but the plan failed.
The decision by UTV to hand the licence back after no other buyers came forward is indicative of the stresses and strains that have impacted upon media outlets of all types through 2008.
2008 FLASHBACK: THE SCOTTISH BROADCASTING COMMISSION
WHEN its first interim report was published in January, it was clear the kind of role the Scottish Broadcasting Commission aimed to play.
Chaired by former BBC Scotland head of news Blair Jenkins, it hit the mark straight away by criticising the widespread practice of calling programmes Scottish when they weren't, to get around Ofcom's out-of-London quotas.
Its second and third reports on the cultural and democratic aspects of Scottish broadcasting continued in the same vein. Since many suspected it had been set up to further the SNP's aim to create an independent Scottish broadcaster, it came as little surprise to many when BBC Scotland received the bulk of the flak.
However, when the SBC's final recommendations came in September they did not include fully devolving broadcasting powers. Instead, the thing that grabbed the headlines was a "digital network for Scotland". Jenkins said between £50 million and £75m should be set aside so that Scotland could have its own TV channel.
The idea met with a mixed response. Some saw it as the only way to balance the current metropolitan bias. Others wrote off the idea as culturally bankrupt, criticising it for a supposed lack of outward focus.
The Holyrood government has nevertheless adopted the idea, with the caveat that it isn't paying for it.
However, the SBC's success could also be measured in the promises it managed to squeeze out of broadcasters. The BBC promised to raise the amount of money it spends on commissioning network programmes in Scotland from less than 3% to around 9%, roughly equal to population share, by 2016. Channel 4 promised to double its Scottish spend by 2012, albeit from a low base.
Print this story
Email to a friend
