This is why newspapers need investment and imagination to succeed

This year though is special in that I’ve been invited to deliver the annual Magnusson Lecture that commemorates the life and reflects the interests of the great Icelandic polymath Magnus Magnusson.

I’ve no doubt that the travails faced by the media today in an era of so-called “fake news” and constraints on its ability to report freely would have concerned and absorbed this hugely talented journalist, writer and television presenter were he still with us today.

Writing this column as I am on my 61st birthday, in a world that seems more chaotic, dangerous and unpredictable than it has been for many years, I thought that tomorrow’s lecture was as good a time as any to reflect on the four decades spent reporting from the world’s trouble spots.

Titled Witness to War, the lecture also presents the opportunity to reveal, warts and all, some of the most pressing challenges faced by war correspondents as they go about their work in far-flung places in these especially volatile political times.

That’s not to say that foreign and war correspondents are the only colleagues within the journalistic fraternity who currently find themselves under unprecedented threats from various quarters.

One only need to have tuned into the two-part BBC Scotland documentary The Papers, which concluded on Wednesday night, to realise that all is far from well, especially in the Scottish newspaper ecosystem.

That the documentary showed my colleagues on this newspaper The National and its sister titles The Herald and Evening Times as the dedicated and immensely hardworking professionals that they are was never in any doubt.

Having spent years working alongside them on and off in the newsroom before going freelance I know only too well of that extra mile – or is it 10 these days? – that they go in order to get a newspaper out.

READ MORE: Reader rush as The Papers documentary airs on BBC One

Indeed if this film insight into the life of the newsroom had its failings, among them was not digging hard enough into the extent the personal lives of those colleagues is impacted upon by the immense daily pressures that they face.

It failed too in not exposing those threats that really menace the health and future of newspapers. Sure, the internet and social media have a role to play in that, but the glib pronouncement that Facebook or Twitter is to blame is only part of the story. Likewise the same can be said of that hardy perennial of an excuse cited as a “downturn in advertising revenue” being to blame for persistent cuts.

God knows if I had the equally perennial pound for every time I’ve heard that from newspaper executives over decades as a means of justifying lay offs and cutbacks, I could have bought a few of the titles myself.

Rarely, here in Scotland at least, is there ever any mention of keeping shareholders happy and maximising profits as being the real reason for undermining the “quality” journalism the same people insist they are “committed” to producing.

As any journalist worth their salt will attest, the truth can be difficult to find. In today’s world this search for truth is not helped of course when no less than the president of the United States declares a war on the media, and yet in an interview with The New York Times magazine, speaks a total of 10 falsehoods in 30 minutes.

In its own way the same double standards is also evident in so much of what is happening to the Scottish newspaper industry.

That so few journalists themselves dare write about this is also in great part because both staffers and the increasing number of freelances who depend on paying the mortgage and feeding their kids dare not complain for fear of biting the hand that feeds them.

So much for that old journalistic maxim “without fear or favour”.

Its ethos, it would appear, is fine as it goes so long as you don’t have a go at those now ensconced within the industry who care nothing about why journalism really matters and are more interested in keeping the money-makers happy and their own jobs safe.

Make no mistake about it, the threat to journalists' lives and livelihoods takes many forms these days. Yes, if you are a war correspondent there is the man with the gun sometimes jabbing the barrel in your chest or shooting at you for being somewhere where you might witness what they don’t want the world to see. Then there are those colleagues who disappear in countries for revealing injustice or corruption in its many ugly guises. Closer to home too we now have those politicians who brand journalists as “enemies of the people,” who suggest that they are “treacherous” and happy to “betray” the country.

In so doing they put reporters in the firing line of increased hatred.

READ MORE: Richard Walker: What BBC's The Papers said about journalism

Last but far from least there are those within the industry itself who “support” journalism the way a rope supports a hanged man.

I’m talking about a fifth column, if you like, who through their own financial mercenarism wilfully or innocently make easier the task of those more openly harmful to the fourth estate. I’m speaking of the bean-counters and “managers” who speak in praise of journalism but with a forked tongue.

Yes, newspapers have always been about making money, but they are also about so much more than that. They are democracy’s bulwark against political excess, a means of holding those who abuse power to account. They help right wrongs and guard against the erosion of our individual freedoms.

That a newspaper can do all this and make money is not impossible, but it takes investment and imagination, something that the Scottish newspaper industry has suffered a dearth of.

While so many doom merchants talk about the death of newspapers, titles like The New York Times and others who genuinely invest in their journalism and journalists buck this negativism. Newspapers as we know them historically might very well disappear and new platforms present themselves, but the demand for a journalism that matters has never been more pressing and pronounced.

Difficult as that task will be, ensuring a journalism that matters would be made that much easier if some within the industry started acting like real allies, rather than aiding – albeit indirectly – the very enemies of a viable free press.