Goodbye To The Scotsman

For much of the Nineties I religiously bought The Scotsman every day. It was (at that point) a quality product with good coverage of both UK and International affairs, as well as having the advantage of being doubly-local with Edinburgh and Scottish coverage.

When I joined the railway, we were giving away free The Independent on board the train but I still stuck with buying my Scotsman. I have a problem with the Independent, and it's the same one I have with The Guardian - I like the idea of them more than I like the actual product!

But then a few years ago something changed. The Scotsman went tabloid and lurched into a "cheap" category. We had by this point started to give away The Times on board, and I discovered reading the two newspapers side-by-side that the same stories were much better to read in The Times. The Scotsman felt like a local freesheet without the local coverage, and increasingly without the international coverage.

So I stopped buying it daily. Looking at the circulation figures, I wasn't the only one.

These days, I mostly read the free Times I get at work. On certain shifts, I still buy the Scotsman. I was on one of those shifts both yesterday and today.

I have to say that The Scotsman's wavering on environmental issues bugs me. One minute they're encouraging us all to go green, the next they're questioning the very existence of climate change. And the letters page would make even the most battle-hardened environmentalist weep with frustration.

But it was yesterday's Editorial which had me chocking on my coffee. Smarmy and mocking with the bile barely below the surface, it was suggesting that we should have kept pumping CFC's into the atmosphere and bugger the ozone layer. If only we hadn't listened to the scientists in the late 80s, then we wouldn't have to put up with their whining about climate change now and we could tell them all to piss off.

I'm paraphrasing strongly there, but it's what I took from the piece.

So there I was this morning in WH Smith, and as usual for this shift I picked up a Scotsman, folded it under my arm and headed for the checkout. Then I stopped. That Editorial was still in my mind. I realised I had no desire to read something with that tone again. Why put myself through the pain of the letters page or the Opinion pieces that suggest I'm part of a global conspiracy? The newspaper may be "local", but dammit, I was not...I am not prepared to finance that sort of writing any more.

I put the Scotsman back on the shelf and picked up the Independent, with it's 20 page climate change supplement. It was much more agreeable.