RE: [A-List] Middle East intrigue

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Mark Jones writes:

So much for the Kurds being allies of Iran--but why is the 
Scotsman, a reputable paper, allowing itself to be fed such utter crap? 

----

Answer: because its editor-in-chief is Andrew Neil, the preposterous
Thatcherite ex-crony of Rupert Murdoch whose responsibility for closing
down The European (Robert Maxwell's one half-decent idea) did not stop
the Barclay Brothers from hiring him to repeat the trick first at the
Sunday Business and now at the Scotsman, where a platoon of editors and
entire army of journalists have been lost/fired in Neil's efforts to
turn a major regional player into a pathetic mouthpiece of punk
Thatcherism in precisely the soil where it failed and continues to fail.
Not even the genteel middle classes of Edinburgh like their Thatcherism
neat -- they prefer it to be diluted with some homely social
conscience-type stuff of the sort represented by Malcolm Rifkind and Ian
Lang -- both movers and shakers in the "left" Tory Reform Group. Neil,
on the other hand, will be waving the stars and stripes and will be
happy to take any crap fed him by the CIA and other assorted spooks, if
only because it saves him having to pay any half-decent journalist at a
time when circulation is dwindling and budgets are very tight indeed.

Michael Keaney

-----

'Neil has lost the plot at Scotsman'
 
He's worked with him and liked him but Roy Greenslade can find no
defence for Andrew Neil's dismal tenure at The Scotsman
The Sunday Herald, 21 July 2002
 
I DON'T care what other people say: Andrew Neil was a fine editor of the
Sunday Times. He managed to win the respect of many sceptical
journalists on the staff, including those of us whose politics were very
different from his own.

He combined broad vision with an eye for detail. He was often out of the
office but missed nothing. At a personal level, he treated me well in
the office and befriended me out of it. I have no bad memories of our
three years together.

I state this to allay any suspicions that what I am about to write stems
from an anti-Neil agenda. It most certainly does not. What follows is a
dispassionate assessment of Andrew Neil as publisher of The Scotsman,
and I sincerely wish I could be writing the opposite of what follows.

The truth is that Andrew's record at The Scotsman is deplorable, and if
he was the analyst looking objectively at his own performance, his view
might well be harsher even than mine.

His blustering appearance on Newsnight Scotland convinced me that he has
lost the plot. Forget his manner. When Andrew is at bay he always blazes
away. Consider instead what he said, what he didn't say and, with the
greatest respect to interview Gordon Brewer, what he wasn't asked and
therefore didn't have to answer.

He said that The Scotsman's circulation is the same as it was when he
took over as editor-in-chief in 1997. If one accepts the official ABC
figures at face value, that appears to be true. In the six months
between January and June 1997, The Scotsman sold a daily average of
78,762. In the same period this year it sold 78,525.

But the devil, as Andrew knows all too well, is in the detail. Comparing
the copies sold at full cover price reveals a different story: in 1997
they totalled 77,838 and this year, just 70,627. That represents a 9.26%
fall.

Even that doesn't convey the real drama facing The Scotsman because the
paper's sales are audited monthly and the latest figure for June shows
that only 67,872 were sold at full price.

Incidentally, I could point out that during Andrew's tenure the
performance of The Scotsman's stablemate, Scotland on Sunday, has been
worse because, using a similar comparison, it has declined by 22.6%. But
I won't get diverted. Let's stick to the flagging flagship.

In his defence of his dismal sales figures, Andrew said: 'We would like
it to be better, but in this market being the same is a bit of a
success'.

Really? He is right to point out that national broadsheets have lost
sales over the past five years, but those titles haven't had a £5
million relaunch during which the cover price was slashed to 20p for
four months and 30p for ten months more.

This boosted the sale to an artificial 100,000-plus, prompting a public
relations company to deluge me with press releases boasting of The
Scotsman's supremacy. What was the point of getting to the magic six
figures only to watch every additional sales disappear in the following
months?

Andrew argued passionately that his relaunched Scotsman was aiming at an
upscale audience. But quantity achieved over a couple of months is no
substitute for quality gained over a prolonged period. The price-cutting
strategy was utterly misguided.

The truth is that the price cut wasted money and the people who will be
made redundant in coming months should know that their lost jobs have as
much to do with that mistaken ploy as the advertising downturn.

Now let's turn to the editorial approach. Brewer remarked to Andrew at
one point: 'You said it was going to be a successful international
newspaper'.

He replied: 'It was never going to be an international newspaper'.

True. But what Andrew said before his great relaunch, as several of his
past editors have confirmed to me, is that he believed The Scotsman
should be a national paper for all of Britain, not just for Scotland.

That was why The Scotsman was made available in London, why its
circulation accounting was changed from the regional six-monthly report
to rub shoulders with the monthly national titles, and why he held his
main press conferences in London. (Notice also that he conducted his
Newsnight interview from London).

He told me he expected not just ex-pat Scots in England to buy The
Scotsman but English people too. In other words, he wanted to transform
the paper -- despite the specificity of its title -- into a United
Kingdom journal, with an international and Britain-wide news agenda.

It has, of course, proved hopeless. Last month The Scotsman sold 2000
copies in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, a single copy in the
Republic of Ireland and 24 outside the UK.

Again, it was a flawed strategy which did little to boost confidence in
The Scotsman in its east of Scotland heartland. Indeed, this is the
reason so many staff have become disillusioned: they believe that
Andrew's grandiose ambitions to be a publisher on a level with the
London press tycoons has destroyed The Scotsman's unique relationship
with its audience.

The other undoubted problem has been Andrew's tendency to interfere in
the paper's editorial decision-making. I know he has denied this at
every turn, citing his wider responsibilities within the Barclay
brothers' publishing empire.

But I cannot believe that the last three editors he has hired and fired
-- Alan Ruddock, Tim Luckhurst and Rebecca Hardy - have lied about their
experiences. Each of them has told tales so similar they couldn't be
inventing them.

I know what Andrew is like. He just can't help himself. He knows that he
knows best and he isn't the least bit reticent in saying so.

That hasn't only made the editors' lives intolerable, because it also
filters down to the whole staff, unsettling an editorial floor already
suffering from low morale. No wonder a motion of no confidence in him
was voted for by so many staff.

Not that Andrew will worry unduly about that. He loves a fight. But he
was wrong to accuse the National Union of Journalists of taking against
him because he defeated the union at Wapping.

Few of the journalists at The Scotsman can remember the battle of 1986.
They are worried about what has happened in the last five years and what
will happen in the next couple of months.

They just don't see why they should pay for errors Andrew has made and I
sympathise with their plight.

Roy Greenslade is media commentator of The Guardian