Johnston Press exploring TV channel plans

JOHNSTON Press, owner of Scotsman Publications, is exploring plans to launch television stations within its newspaper titles, its chief executive said yesterday.

Ashley Highfield said he was studying plans for newspaper journalists to shoot video to be made available online to readers in a bid to boost traffic on websites across the group’s titles.

“By the end of this summer, we will have a different culture of journalists equipped with mobile technology,” he told a Scotsman conference on the future of the media yesterday. “We are going to launch a bunch of TV channels,” he added. He later confirmed that those plans could include a “ScotsmanTV” model.

Mr Highfield, a former executive at Microsoft and the BBC, told the conference that now was “the most exciting and maybe the most scary time to be in the business”.

But he downplayed fears that print media was facing terminal decline. Despite audiences moving steadily online, he said that the group “will still be printing newspapers in 20 years’ time”.

He also argued that local newspapers were becoming increasingly important thanks to a growing sense of community within towns and regions across Britain.

“During the Jubilee and the Olympic torch bearing, you have seen a real sense of identity and a strengthening of community,” he said. “For us, as a community publisher, we have got a healthy future.”

Johnston Press’s more than 200 titles have undergone a major restructuring since Mr Highfield’s appointment last year, which has seen hundreds of job cuts, but an increase in its share price, which now stands at 15p, from lows of 5p last year.