In one of the most egregious examples of value destruction in newspaper history, JPI Media (formerly Johnston Press), owners of The Scotsman and a raft of regional titles, is sold for a mere £10m, spread over 3 years. They bought The Scotsman Group alone for £160m in 2005.

The Scotsman had been purchased for £80m 10 years before that. So we (I was Publisher for those 10 years) doubled its value in a decade. Add in another £25m for the magnificent building we constructed (which JP did not buy but rented before moving to much reduced premises).

So after a decade of massive valued added, JPI Media managed to destroy most of it in the following 15 years. The Scottish political and media establishment has been curiously quiet about JPI Media’s appalling record. Perhaps because they were complicit.

Alex Salmond in 2005 encouraged JP to buy The Scotsman.
Just get Andrew Neil out the door and sales will soar, he assured them. In fact, sales went from 75,000 to under 20,000. So the Salmond/JP strategy didn’t go exactly to plan. In fact they wasted a great Scottish institution