Newspaper sales continue to drop, leading to questions for the future of the journalism industry in Scotland and the UK.

ABC circulation figures show a continued drop in newspaper sales, with some papers dropping as much as 24% in a year. I speak to Scottish journalists across generations to gain their perspective on this worrying decline:

Carlos Alba, former Scotland editor of the Sunday times moved to the PR industry after being made redundant:

‘The main factor was the declining newspaper sales and people’s switch to online’ ‘that accelerated the decline that was already there with people migrating away from print newspapers to online.’

‘The newspapers aren’t the cash cows they used to be. Pre-internet that was the only show in town.’

Mr. Alba gives his thoughts on the future of print journalism:

‘Some newspapers will survive, the sun, the daily mail, the telegraph… they will continue to exist even if they move online.’

‘Some of the other titles will move online and see if there is a financial model that works for them, but if not I anticipate that some of them may fold.’

Gemma Murphy, a journalism graduate from Strathclyde has great worries about the industries future

‘It’s disheartening, it is. It’s one of the first things when you tell people you’ve done journalism they go ‘its all online now.’

‘it loses the integrity of the story because it’s so valued on how it looks online…its changed the whole route of journalism’.

A member of the LGBTQ+ community, Miss Murphy speaks to if now is a good time for marginalised voices to be heard:

‘I don’t think it’s a good time, but it’s a needed time.’

She added, ‘At the top it’s all men. It does put people off… I think my main focus there needs to be more trans journalists, especially right now with recent comments that have been made.’

Murphy worked throughout her 4 year degree in the media industry ‘In the 80s and 90s women couldn’t be in the newsrooms. But we get distracted at the fact ‘there’s so many women in the newsroom now’ but are they POC, are they queer, are they trans? We can’t just look at the surface level.’

John Mclellan, former editor of the telegraph and director of news brand Scotland, previously named the Scottish newspaper society, has a positive outlook on the state of print:

‘the ABC figures are no longer a reliable measurement of impact and audience reach. Though nobody denies that hard copy sales are in decline.’

‘They really don’t tell anything like the full picture, for that you need to go to audience figures.’

Mr McClellan believes that the future of print journalism is brighter than figures indicate:

‘The industry is moving away from a reliance on hard copy… The times subscription levels are ahead of their peak print circulation.’

‘It’s more about going into multi-platform journalism, that’s the reality of it.’

Mr McClellan gives perspective as to why the newspaper society was renamed to news brand scotland, perhaps giving us an indication to the future of Scottish journalism:

‘It’s trying to do what we can to challenge perceptions that news publishers are primarily legacy operations eking out the last vestiges of revenues from a dying trade and instead are offering commercial partners a Multiplatform environment where they can reach their audience in lots of different ways.’

Click here to read the 2023 Reuters report on the current state of digital journalism