The Scotsman

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Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Compact

Owner	Johnston Press
Editor	Mike Gilson [1]
Founded	1817
Political allegiance	Centre-right, Unionist
Price	GBP 0.65 Monday-Friday & GBP 0.85 Saturday
Headquarters	108 Holyrood Rd, Edinburgh

Website: www.scotsman.com

The Scotsman's offices in Edinburgh

The Scotsman is a Scottish national newspaper, published in Edinburgh. It has an audited circulation of 63,974 and a readership of 217,000 across Scotland.

Since August 16, 2004, it has been printed in compact format. Its sister Sunday publication, which remains broadsheet, is titled Scotland on Sunday. The Scotsman Publications Ltd also produces the Edinburgh Evening News and the Herald & Post series of free newspapers in Edinburgh, Fife, and West Lothian.

1 History
2 View on the Scottish constitutional question
3 See also
4 External links

The Scotsman was launched [2] in 1817 as a liberal weekly newspaper by lawyer William Ritchie and customs official Charles Maclaren in response to the "unblushing subservience" of competing newspapers to the Edinburgh establishment. The paper was pledged to "impartiality, firmness and independence". After the abolition of newspaper stamp tax in Scotland in 1850, The Scotsman was relaunched as a daily newspaper priced at 1d and a circulation of 6000 copies.

In 1953 the newspaper was bought by Canadian millionaire Roy Thomson who was in the process of building an enormous media empire. The paper was in 1995 bought by billionaires David and Frederick Barclay for £85 million. They moved the newspaper from its traditional Edinburgh office on North Bridge, which is now an upmarket hotel, to state-of-the-art offices on Holyrood Road, near where the Scottish Parliament Building was subsequently built.

In December 2005, The Scotsman was acquired, in a £160 million deal, by its current owners Johnston Press a company founded in Scotland and now one of the top three largest local newspaper publishers in the UK as well as a major force on the internet.

The last decade or so has seen the paper replaced by The Herald as the preeminent Scottish quality newspaper.^{[citation needed]}

The Scotsman was a staunch supporter of Scottish devolution, though has been critical of devolution since. It strongly opposed the decision to create the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

It is aligned to the Scottish Labour Party political party at the present time, and it tends to take a highly Unionist stance. This has led to it becoming dubbed by nationalists as 'The North-Brit-man'.^{[citation needed]}