The
Scotsman - (en)
The Scotsman is a Scottish national newspaper, published in Edinburgh.
Since August 16, 2004, it has been printed in compact format. Its
sister Sunday publication, which remains broadsheet, is titled
Scotland on Sunday. The Scotsman Publications Ltd also produces the
Edinburgh Evening News and the Herald & Post series of free
newspapers in Edinburgh, Fife, and West Lothian.
The Scotsman was launched in 1817 as a liberal weekly newspaper by
lawyer William Ritchie and customs official Charles Maclaren in
response to the "unblushing subservience" of competing
newspapers to the Edinburgh establishment. The paper was pledged to
"impartiality, firmness and independence". After the
abolition of newspaper stamp tax in Scotland in 1850, The Scotsman was
relaunched as a daily newspaper priced at 1d and a circulation of 6000
copies.
In 1953 the newspaper was bought by Canadian millionaire Roy Thomson
who was in the process of building an enormous media empire. The paper
was in 1995 bought by billionaires David and Frederick Barclay for £85
million. They moved the newspaper from its landmark Edinburgh office
on North Bridge, which is now an upmarket hotel, to new offices on
Holyrood Road, near where the Scottish Parliament Building was
subsequently built. While under their ownership, controversial
journalist Andrew Neil, a former editor of The Sunday Times, was
publisher of the newspaper, in addition to The Business and The
Spectator magazine.
The Scotsman was a staunch supporter of Scottish devolution but has
since been critical of the Scottish Parliament. While not aligned to
any political party, The Scotsman is proud of its Scottish roots and
its reputation as a Scottish national newspaper. For example it has
been a strong opponent of the decision to abolish the Scottish
Regiments.
The Scotsman has a daily circulation of around 59,000. Circulation has
fallen dramatically since 2001 (faster than that of comparable
Scottish titles) when, after a brief experiment with price-cutting,
the editorial budget was slashed following the departure of many
senior staff to the shortlived Scottish business newspaper Business
AM. Recent additional cuts have seen the newspaper abandon original
foreign news coverage with the closure of all the foreign bureaux
established under the editorship of Alan Ruddock (1998-2000)and Tim
Luckhurst (February - May 2000). High status columnists including
Edward Pearce and Michael Portillo have been dropped. Attempts to
rival the content of English newspapers appear to have been been
abandoned in favour of less ambitious content and a substantially
reduced editorial budget. The current editor, Mike Gilson, is the
seventh to edit the newspaper since 1998. He started in the autumn of
2006, joining The Scotsman from The News, of Portsmouth.
In December 2005 it was announced that the paper, along with the other
Scotsman Publications titles, was sold to Edinburgh-based newspaper
group Johnston Press in a £160 million deal ending Neil's ten-year
relationship with the newspaper.
This takeover has resulted in a number of redundancies, rigorous cost
control and continuing steep circulation decline, but the Scotsman
remains profitable.
The Scotsman is sometimes jokingly referred to as The Hootsmon,
particularly by journalists on its rival papers The Herald and the
Sunday Herald.
