Concern over online versus newspaper advertising in Scotland

The House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee is contacting the Scottish government and Scottish councils about where they place job adverts and public notices.

This is in part because a lot of these adverts have switched from newspapers to online advertisers.

Like the Scottish Affairs Committee, I also suspect some of this is an exercise of procurement and they are therefore saving people like me, the council tax payer money.

However, I do also agree that in parts of Scotland switching entirely to online advertising will be counter productive, for three reasons;

1. There are parts of Scotland where a large percentage of the town or villages are still not online.

2. There are parts of rural Scotland such as the Borders, Shetland, Argyll & Bute and the Highlands & Islands where the broadband access and take up is so poor that it is not reliable enough.

3. There will be small towns and villages across Scotland where the local paper is still King.

The whole point of these public notices is that the council r government has to show they are advertising to the maximum audience, then I am afraid they need to do a mixture of both to ensure that because online is not the only thing people look at and some will not know to look online unless the relevant body has told them so.

Let us ensure our councils and government are supporting the newspaper industry as well as the online industry.