IT’S hard to believe that it has been a year since we sat down to produce the very first issue of the Sunday National following the sad demise of the Sunday Herald.
This being The National, we did not of course have the advantage of months of planning behind us before we unleashed the title on an unsuspecting world.
If anything the Sunday National was even more hastily conceived than its daily sister, which was put together in just a matter of weeks.
The speed with which we were required to act had its advantages and its disadvantages.
Of course we might have preferred to polish our plans a little more, to have thought through at a slightly more leisurely pace the ideas we put together.
But there’s a lot to be said for seizing the moment and pushing ahead with plans while the excitement and passion is still burning.
You can finesse your work later, but the important task is to capture the thrill of creating a new title.
And it has indeed been a thrilling ride, following the unpredictable twists and turns of a period which will have historians scratching their heads in confusion some decades hence.
When the Sunday Herald came out for independence in the white heat of the 2014 referendum campaign, I believed strongly that such a move was essential if the Scottish media was to do its job, which is to properly reflect the wide range of current opinion on the important issues of the day.
Imagine the Sunday Herald had not taken its stance. Could we really argue that it was perfectly healthy for every one of the many and varied newspapers on Scottish newsstands every day were united by one thing only ... an opposition (or at best antipathy) towards the independence of Scotland.
The fact that so many media commentators would have considered such a situation to be perfecty acceptable – and even “normal” – perhaps underlines the dire record of our press on diversity.
Of course the criticism the Sunday Herald attracted – and which has been thrown at The National and the Sunday National – has been depressingly predictable.
Our detractors seem to believe it is impossible to campaign for constitutional change while remaining true to the spirit of proper journalism. We’ve been labelled ‘‘McPravda’’ while right-wing ideologues are praised for “bravely expressing hard-hitting views”.
I’m proud today to publish on the front page of this section Alex Benchimol’s fantastic essay on the early days of the Scottish press.
He shows that it is the current uniformity of a press which blandly accepts a status quo that actively works against our best interests which is unusual, and not the hunger for social and constitutional change.
There were editors in the 18th century who were so driven by a vision of Scotland’s potential that they were prepared to risk imprisonment or even death to advocate change and opposition.
That’s not to say Scottish newspapers fail to produce impressive journalism. There are recent examples of brave, investigative reports.
But support for independence does not preclude such journalism and we need a broader range of constituional opinion than the current media model offers.
Of course there are some who would argue that it no longer matters what newspapers write as social media provides the main source of news in the modern age.
I’d question the truth of that, as well as the imagined benefits if it were true. But space does not allow that wider argument today.
So let me simply thank our readers for their support throughout a tumultuous first year.
We’re immensely proud of the newspaper we’ve created ... but we couldn’t have done it without you.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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