There’s a neat, if small,  illustration of one of the reasons why Scottish papers are struggling in yesterday’s Herald (apologies for not blogging this until today).

The paper carried a story about the nominations for this year’s Sony Radio Academy Awards.  One of the nominations is for the excellent Radio Scotland interviewer, Edi Stark, but this fact failed to interest the Herald journalist who wrote the story.

She did not get a single mention in the piece that accompanied the list of nominees.

Instead the article concentrated  mainly on Radio 1’s Chris Moyles.  Moyles is up against, amongst others,  Clyde DJ George Bowie – but his nomination again attracted no interest. Bowie was just listed, without comment,  in the copy alongside the other nominees.

There are various explanations for this. The most likely is that The Herald just lifted the story from PA, which of course would have led with a London angle, without changing it. 

If indeed it was re-written by a Herald reporter, it seems bizarre that the Scottish angle was  completely ignored.

Either way, it demonstrates one of the big problems for the Scottish national press. They cannot compete with the huge resources of their London rivals – their only hope is to emphasise their key selling point – their Scottishness.

But on this occasion The Herald just ran the same lazy line that could be found in the London papers.  I accept that this is a small item – but readers are being seduced by The Times, Guardian etc, with more pages and supplements because of their massively bigger budgets. If The Herald ignores its number one advantage over these papers (it’s Scottish, they are not) then what hope is there for it?

I’m of the generation of journalists who started out about 20 years ago (that can’t be right, surely) in well-staffed offices which were just coming to terms with what was grandly called “new technology” -  ie computers.

I cut my teeth in a district office of a big regional daily. In my office alone (never mind the main newsroom) we had eight reporters. Circulation was also about 20,000 higher than now.

It’s tempting to say that newspaper sales have fallen because newsrooms have lost so many staff and therefore decent content – tempting but also naive.

While I think it is madness for Scottish papers in particular to be cutting back on Scottish reporters (which means tossing away their big advantage over the London “nationals”) there’s obviously a hell of a lot  more to circulation falls than staff cutbacks.

But if papers do have to make redundancies why do they have to do it so badly?

There’s a brilliant example of this in The Guardian media section which publishes memos from Rebekah Wade, John Witherow and other News International editors, explaining why they are making  job losses.

Any quarter-decent journalist reading these memos would recognise that the top line is the job losses themselves. All the stuff about investing in editorial and the necessity of combining online and paper editions may well be true – but these memos read like the kind of useless spin operations governments and companies out out while burying the obvious (and usually damaging) news angle further down.

Only one editor uses the word “sorry” about the redundancies and there’s a general tone of “don’t worry about these minor job losses – onward with News International!”

Why not just be honest with the people who know what the real news is: sorry, we have to make these redundancies. We think there is some good news but we know that most of you will not be concerned about that at present.

It’s almost as bad as the  incredibly insensitive interview given by the managing editor of The Herald titles, who went on Newsnight Scotland to talk about the exciting time ahead for the group on the same day that all staff had been told they would have to re-apply for their jobs.

Why can’t these people just tell it straight?