New Statesman Scotland
It has become common among Scots - and this diary is far from guiltless - to mourn the way in which Scottish companies are prone to fall prey to English and/or foreign corporate predators. Any such threat to newspapers or television companies sends particular chills up and down the collective spine. We are currently dreading the telly giant Granada making its move on the Scottish Media Group, owners of (among much else) Scottish Television, Grampian Television, the Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times newspapers, and that organisation so beloved of British cineastes, Pearl & Dean.
But we have been so busy getting ready to rend our garments that we have overlooked something: these things work both ways. Tucked away at the western end of Edinburgh is the corporate HQ of the Johnston Press plc, which may be the hungriest media group in the land. Since it went public in 1988, the Johnston Press has been snapping up newspapers with alligator-like relish. It made its latest acquisitions (in Portsmouth and Sunderland) in June this year. Johnston Press now owns a whopping 185 titles, from Angus in the north to Sussex in the south. Nine are important local evening papers. And, yet, not a cheep has been heard from the good folk of Yorkshire, East Anglia or the Cinque Ports. Maybe we Scots are worrying too much.
A few days ago, this diary received a communication from Harvard Management Update. This, we were informed, was "a newsletter from Harvard Business School Publishing", a division of the Harvard Business School. "There is no publication like Harvard Management Update," the circulation manager Paul Szymanski proclaimed. "Not in the US. Not in Europe. Not in Asia." Which could well be true. All other newsletters probably try to get their geography right. Szymanski addresses his circulars to "Edinburgh, England, UK". It made this diary wonder what all these vaunted MBAs from the Harvard Business School are doing to the economies of the western world.
Still on the subject of tangled nationalisms: the news that the Jamaican-born footballer David Johnson cannot now play for Scotland has come as a blow to Scotland's football supremo Craig Brown and his hard-pressed Tartan Army. It's not that the 22-year-old Ipswich Town star has disgraced himself with recreational drugs, loose women or even cynical fouls. It is much worse. Sleuths from the Scottish Football Association's international committee have discovered that Johnson's natural mother (the lad was adopted) was English. Brown is said to be ashen-faced at this gruesome revelation.
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