Graham Ogilvy

Things are about to get even worse. The decline of the traditional media cannot be understated. Collapse is imminent, and the circulation figures speak for themselves. The Scotsman now sells around 3,500 daily with 3,000 give-aways and around 4,000 digital subscribers. The Herald sells around 10,000 with a further 10,000 digital subscriptions. The once mighty Daily Record recorded ABC audited sales in February of 43,342 – down from a high of 780,000 and its sister publication the Sunday Mail is down from a high of c.850,000 to just 39,783 – and recorded an annual drop in sales of 20.3 per cent.

The Sunday Post, which famously featured in The Guinness Book of Records as the newspaper with the highest saturation circulation in the world, when its circulation topped 1.1 million, now officially sells 30,525 – last year it declined by 17.3 per cent. The Press Gazette estimates the circulation of The Guardian to be around 55,000.

Court reporters and legal affairs correspondents are an expensive luxury for these hollowed-out titles and are becoming a thing of the past. A court reporter in a Sheriff Court is today as rare as a successful appeal in the Criminal Appeal Court. (Pretty rare!)

When, in 1924, Lord Hewart pronounced that “Justice must be seen to be done” he was referring to perception rather than the act of publishing but his dictum stands today.

Launching the Reporters’ guide, the Lord President, Lord Pentland, rightly stressed: “Openness and transparency are extremely important principles within our justice system. The public have a right to know what happens in their courts and the media play a very important role in that by regularly watching and reporting on proceedings.”

He added: “It is well known that the number of court reporters is in decline and the instantaneous nature of today’s news means that journalists are facing increasingly tight deadlines. That’s why SCTS has developed a guide with clear and concise advice on the information available at different stages in proceedings.”

It is a laudable initiative and follows on from several others: judges sentencing statements, frequently triumphant press releases from the Crown Office and the televising of court cases have all demonstrated the willingness of the Scottish legal system to commit to openness.

But will it ever be more than a sticking plaster? I fear not. Soon there will be even fewer court reporters as the newspapers, followed by beleaguered television news services wither and die. The Herald recently advertised for a court reporter and received no applicants.

In a bid to shore up collapsing local newspapers and assuage despondent publishers, the BBC has launched a Local Democracy Reporters scheme – paying for 165 journalists to cover courts and councils, sharing copy with local papers and the corporation. But the problem is that the papers are dying anyway and, unsurprisingly, recruits are hard to find. The UK now boasts a number of ‘news deserts’ where local news coverage is virtually non-existent – one of these is the London borough of Lewisham!

Nature abhors a vacuum and in Northamptonshire communications professionals employed by the police now outnumber journalists on local newspapers as police social media channels gather momentum. My request to Police Scotland for the numbers of communications professionals employed by the force predictably, and pathetically, went unanswered with routine advice to file an FOI request issued. Perhaps they are too numerous to count each other? But there is little doubt that the numbers of police and COPFS communications employees will outnumber several Scottish newsrooms put together.

To chronically under-resourced defence agents this will all sound familiar. Where and when will the defence be heard if a veil of darkness descends on our courts – only to be lifted after conviction when the judges, prosecutors and police all have their say? Voices which, we note, are never heard in the event of an acquittal or successful appeal.

And even when Crown Office do put out press releases, for which we are most grateful, where are they being reported? Justice must be seen to be done not only to bolster confidence in our system but also ‘pour decourager les autres’ (It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the pillory was finally abolished in 1837 when the popular press began to rise.)

So, consider the shocking example the Stirlingshire chipboard manufacturer which was fined £2.1 million in November 2022 after a worker died in horrific circumstances. The Crown Office put out a press release which was carried by Scottish Legal News and our sister publication Scottish Construction Now. The next morning it was only reported in The Scotsman. A week later the Stirling Observer (circulation 2,009) carried the story. The days of mass circulation red-tops screaming ‘Worker boiled alive - Firm fined £2.1 million’ may be gone but this story surely deserved more exposure. Little wonder that the firm chose not to appeal sentence, its reputation remained virtually undented.

And what of the case of the three Scottish solicitors Robertson, Blackwood and Lyons? Their nine-week fraud trial went unreported until their conviction and subsequent imprisonment in January 2023. An unthinkable state of affairs in days gone by.

The danger is that cyber-nutters and conspiracy theorists on social media will flourish as our courts go unreported. Among the current gems doing the rounds is, “Sturgeon was never going to be prosecuted – it was all arranged.”

The only papers likely to survive are those owned by non-taxpaying billionaire tycoons like Lord Rothermere (Daily Mail) and Rupert Murdoch (Sun, Times etc), et al. These are the very people whose publications have denounced judges as “enemies of the people”, ridiculed judges for their personal and private lives and perpetuate the ‘soft on crime’ mantra that has led us to have the highest imprisonment rates in Europe. For them lawyers will always either be greedy or lefties, irritating reminders of the rule of law which appears so inconvenient to them.  Their newspapers and media empires will remain primarily as tools to wield power and influence.

Our mass media, now dubbed the ‘legacy media’ by Mr Musk, was flawed and imperfect. Its ownership in too few hands. It was reckless and irresponsible, sometimes criminal. But it was all we had to provide some kind of scrutiny – the Post Office/Horizon scandal was highlighted by an ITV drama but it was first investigated by a young woman reporter at Computer Weekly.

I would like to end on the obligatory optimistic note, but it is very hard to see a way forward at present. As we observe the death throes of what was once a mass media, the last words go to Joni Mitchell:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone