Jim Raeburn, director of The Scottish Newspaper Society has written a piece in reaction to The Drum’s leader in its edition released 19 February.

In that edition, the leader ‘Old Fashioned, Luddite Battle Looms for Press’ referred to the Scottish Newspaper Industry’s campaign to prevent The Scottish Government removing its public notice advertising solely online.

Here is Jim Raeburn’s response in full.

The colourful language of your Upfront piece (“Old fashioned, Luddite battle looms for press”) of 19 February may be entertaining but is strangely lacking in any understanding of the democratic case for the retention of Public Information Notices (PINs) in newspapers.

You choose to ignore:

1.    in a debate in the Scottish Parliament on 28 January all four opposition parties voted 76-48 in support of the industry’s case;

2.    the UK Government in its November 2009 response to the Scottish Affairs Committee’s report on the Scottish press  stated its view that there should not be a policy of publishing public notices only online simply to save money;

3.    the UK Government announced on 21 December that there would be no changes to rules which oblige councils in England to advertise planning applications in their local newspapers;

4.       Ofcom’s Media Tracker showing that nearly 10 times as many people in Scotland use newspapers than they do the internet as their main source of information about their local area;

5.    Ofcom’ s Communications Report 2009 showing that the proportion of households in Scotland  with a broadband connection was 60% in the first quarter of last year compared to 68% across the UK as a whole.   The figure for Glasgow was 30%.

Have our MPs and MSPs really got it so wrong?   What was uppermost in their minds was that removing the legal obligation to advertise in newspapers would demonstrably undermine a fundamental part of the democratic process and the public’s right to know.  

The whole point of PINs is that they should be readily visible.   It is widely accepted for the reasons given above that newspapers are established like no other source of information as THE place to find PINs.

At no stage have we said that PINs should not be published online but experience with the licensing legislation tells us that if online is offered as an alternative then local authorities will abandon the advertising of PINs in newspapers for no other reason than to save money.

Jim Raeburn, director
Scottish Newspaper Society