Articles by Will Peakin
Will reality match a bold bet on The Scotsman owner’s future?
Going cap in hand to the banks, the departure of yet another editor, plunging advertising revenue; they appeared to be just the latest chapters in the decline of a once mighty newspaper company. According to Ashley Highfield, chief executive of Johnston Press, publishers of The Scotsman, they mark the beginning of its transformation.
At the delayed publication of the company’s annual results last month, Highfield, who studied computing at City University Business School before joining Coopers and Lybrand as a management consultant, presented a 60-slide outline of his strategy to remake Johnston Press as a successful online business, with some print interests, by 2020.
Only half of the editorial content of produced by the group will be written by journalists; “content creators” would be split evenly between journalists and “users”. Highfield’s new business model for the company envisages its print readership shrinking from 11 to eight million and digital consumers doubling to 20 million. Over the coming years, the group’s 18 daily print titles will be reduced to just “a few”.
The plan, called ‘Towards 2020: transforming regional media across the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland’, includes “many more community contributors … regional editorial hubs … central templating”. But it also asserts there will be “journalists on the ground in every town (it’s our USP)”.
Since taking over last November, Highfield has been extolling a mantra of “local, social, mobile”. By the beginning of the next decade, he believes that 75 per cent of the company’s output will be consumed digitally – mostly on mobile devices. Revenue will also be derived evenly from print and digital; today, the latter only accounts for 5 per cent of the group&#...
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Only half of the editorial content of Johnston Press newspapers, which includes The Scotsman, will be written by journalists under plans outlined by the company’s new chief executive. In a presentation accompanying its annual results, Ashley Highfield said that by 2020, “content creators” would be split evenly between journalists and “users” of the company’s websites. Highfield’s new business model for the company envisages its print readership shrinking from 11 to eight million and digital consumers doubling to 20 million. Over the coming years, the group’s 18 daily print titles will be reduced to just “a few”. Highfield, a former vice-president of Microsoft and director of new media and technology at the BBC, where he was responsible for the launch of the corporation’s iPlayer, is proposing a fundamental reshaping of Johnston [...]
