Scottish Publishers Against Government Online Ads
In getting caught up on my industry news and going-on’s, I ran across an article from the BBC, covering a publisher squabble in Scotland. Now although, Scotland is over 3,000 miles away from me, I find it doesn’t hurt to get a global perspective. Anyway, after reading the BBC article, I found myself extremely compelled to share the story on my blog because it made me think that for how far behind I think some of our publishing houses are in North America, there are issues elsewhere too.
It appears that in Scotland, the government is planning to stop posting their community notices in print (municipal government information ‘for us Canadians’) and post them online. Seems logical to me, but apparently news publishers in Scotland think the whole thing ludicrous. The government council feels that through posting the notices online, they could save a whopping £6 million, per year and that online information access would prove to be a better experience for the public. I won’t pull out any sarcastic phrases, but I will note that it should be a given that through having this information posted online, the public will have free access to it, at all times. Often, the notices are important community information having to deal with someones direct neighbourhood or community of interest and to expect individuals to source this information in a print source only is detrimentally limiting.
For newspapers such as the Scotsman, a change like this would be a devastating blow to their bottom line, but it shouldn’t be one that they are surprised about. The ‘Print Revenue’ story has run before. Moreover, other Scottish print media leaders have had negative things to say about the councils potential online ad play. Jim Raeburn, the director of Scottish Daily Newspaper Society, was recorded by the BBC saying that he felt the proposal could undermine democracy. (That’s a far stretch)!
It was unfortunate that throughout this article both parties focused on the revenues lost or saved and not the true importance, which is the people who need to access the information. The councils ultimate goal should be to make their community notices as accessible as possible, and if that means moving to the Web, then so be it.
