Lynda Henderson, MD of Fyneside Media, addressed those gathered at the Scottish Press summit with Minister for Enterprise Energy and Tourism Jim Mather MSP last week to explain her idea for a local press web portal connecting all local newspapers in Scotland.

During the summit meeting between press bosses, representatives from trade bodies such as the NUJ and Mather, where the nation's press industry aired their concerns for the industry – especially the potential loss of revenue from public notice advertising, Henderson outlined her idea to the room.

"My idea is that this would be a website for drilling down into Scotland. It would look like any news site," said Henderson. "There would be an editor and all of the Scottish newspapers would feed their stories online everyday and these would be there with structured access, but the editor would choose the most important stories.”

Henderson added that the site would look like ‘any normal news site’ but would have points of feed for each newspaper, which would receive revenue from the stories which were fed through, and that these would also link back to their own sites.

She also said that while she was looking to promote the idea, she did not believe that she would be successful due to an adverse reaction from the Scottish newspaper corporations and their lack of willingness to work together.

“I think that this could become a powerful marketing tool for Scotland. The problem with VisitScotland’s site is that it is virtually content-free and when you are going somewhere you want to know about the place and you want to get into its bloodstream. VisitScotland doesn’t give you that. So this is something which could be a huge revenue generator for a collective of Scotland’s local papers.”

The site would also contain blogs, features and interviews if Henderson’s idea was to come to fruition.

She also revealed that she had spoken to Mather after the summit meeting that he was ‘very positive’ towards the idea of the site.

Henderson called the idea ‘Scotland Local’ but said this would not have to be the site’s URL address, but that this was simply a ‘working notion’.

Michael Johnston, president of the Scottish Newspaper Association spoke to The Drum before the summit about the Scottish Government's plans to move public notice adverts online and Scottish newspapers in general.