Good journalism is an essential service

Independent news publishing needs help from the Scottish and UK governments, writes John Mclellan

With harrowing pictures from Italian intensive care units beaming into every home on the evening news, accompanied by equally worrying statistics as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, it’s impossible to underestimate the impact this will have on everyone’s lives.

Never, ever before has there simply been nowhere to run or hide. Notionally, people could leg it to the Republic of Ireland to avoid participation in the Second World War, even if the Luftwaffe did bomb Dublin by mistake in 1941, and at the height of the Cold War, we could try to work out how far into the Highlands we needed to be to escape the blast if the Russians ever nuked Faslane. Now everyone knows Covid-19 doesn’t need aircraft or guidance systems to do its deadly work.

That the language of war is still with us illustrates how deep the effects and experience of national catastrophe run. Having a chat, over the top, savvy and plonk all trace their derivation to the Trenches, as does bumf, something which has inexplicably become scarce in the latest emergency. The Spirit of the Blitz has been much debated in recent days, and it is chastening to compare approximately 390,000 British deaths in the six years of the Second World War with Imperial College’s projection of 250,000 coronavirus deaths this year.

It may well be over by Christmas, but reports from China that new cases are tailing off come with warnings that no-one knows if it will return with an even more deadly vengeance later in the year. Not even the most eminent virologist can say with any certainty what will happen when this enemy has never been encountered before.

So our lives will be changed, of that there can be no question, but not all of it will be bad. New ways of working are emerging by the day and more people are being empowered to take decisions because the command and control models of staff in one place under the direction of senior officers are not workable. Meetings being arranged for the sake of meetings which achieve nothing except generate more paperwork and more meetings were commonplace in the public sector a month ago – I’ve sat through plenty of them – but no more. I know of at least one meeting in Edinburgh Council this week which would have soaked up large amounts of officer time and its cancellation will have made not one jot of a difference to the way the city runs.

Technology has enabled people to work from home and given them the ability to fit in family chores and household duties around the needs of their organisations, where it doesn’t matter if you have an hour away from the desk to walk the dog as long as the job gets done; it might mean doing some work at night, but there’s no more need for a jacket to be left draped over the chair when you want to go walkabout.

In the news industry, every time the closure of a historic office is announced there are wails of anguish about an institution being lost, about symbols of community continuity vanishing, but now all that matters is that the service can continue. Noone was more sorry than I when Scotsman Publications left North Bridge and then Holyrood Road – both tributes to the ambitions and optimism of their times – but those times have long gone and the virus emergency has swept away the last vestiges of the old ways of doing things. One major institution has worked out it can continue to operate with just 100 people in a head office designed for many times more and after Covid-19 is defeated it won’t just be back to business as usual.

Distance learning too will change the nature of universities, colleges and schools, because what matters is the learning experience, not just attendance. It doesn’t mean the end of the classroom, but the lecture theatre may well become a thing of the past.

But people will still need to connect, to share information and experiences, to socialise and interact, to be inspired and entertained; to know they are not alone in a world that in an astoundingly short space of time has become fractured beyond all recognition.

It’s not the preservation of offices and corporate structures which matter, but the services themselves, which is why the UK and Scottish Government action to ensure service providers, to use that awful modern description, can survive the crisis.

Few of us will regard our jobs as non-essential – who wants to think of themselves as surplus to requirements – but the news industry risks being overlooked because journalists and publishers are so far down the pecking order of public esteem.

But in the morass of social media, how are people to know what information they should trust, how do they reliably find out what others are doing and how do they know what is happening in the wider community when human contact is being reduced to the bare minimum? For those reasons the news industry is not in the “nice to have” category but an essential service.

It’s not just reporting incidents, chalking up the latest statistics or publishing columns like this, but there is a resource which can be harnessed for the public good. Sports and local entertainment coverage has dried up and Scottish news publishers are already discussing how that can be turned to helping provide schools with an extra educational resource and to open their pages to young writers to document their experiences.

As the rebuilding gets under way whenever we are through this, the publications themselves, some going back 200 years, will provide the much under-valued role of providing continuity and reference points in communities and help people chart a way forward in what will become a new normality but one with which they will be unfamiliar.

It doesn’t need scores of people gathered together in a venerable Victorian or Edwardian building, but the institutions themselves need to survive. As it stands, a combination of vanishing revenue and potential movement restrictions will all but kill off independent news publishing, particularly at a local level, with all the implications for local democracy that entails. Both the UK and Scottish Governments can act to make sure this doesn’t happen and for the sake of the recovery of our communities we hope they do.