W. Hamish Fraser. <i>The Edinburgh History of Scottish Newspapers, 1850–1950</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
No print genre has suffered more from the rise of digital media than newspapers, with local weekly publications disappearing at a rate that suggests eventual extinction.This phenomenon was predictable.Once advertising migrated online, the profitability of printing news rapidly declined.More than 2,600 American local papers disappeared between 2004 and 2023 and, with them, vital regional news.Furthermore, as Amazon led the way toward online merchandising-followed by myriad big retailers-local shops were shuttered, and local advertising dried up.Local radio and television have gone the same way for the same reasons, denying communities access to the information needed to understand and even govern themselves.Only after its loss do we now recognize the value of the hometown paper.As Professor Fraser observes in closing his mammoth study of the golden age of Scottish journalism, 'a weak or non-existent local press has consequences for democracy.Who else can effectively act as the watchdog of courts and councils, of schools and hospitals?Without this … a belief in community may crumble' (p.502).Fraser's preface identifies several problems with the scholarly study of Scotland's newspapers, particularly the tendency to concentrate on the press in Glasgow and Edinburgh and to see 'papers as a source of information on activities rather than opinion' (p.ix).His interest in 'opinion' as defined across the hundreds of papers published in Scotland between 1850 and 1950 motivates him to identify, wherever possible, not just the owner-publishers but also editors, subeditors, and journalists, lifting them out of the 'obscurity of anonymity' (p.ix).Consequently, while Fraser attends to the narratives of the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman, he listens even more closely to the stories of the likes of the Greenock Telegraph and the Montrose Review.This strategy is immediately apparent in the first of the book's four sections, 'Papers for the People,' in which explorations of the dailies and weeklies in Glasgow and Edinburgh are confined to four chapters, with nine dedicated to Dundee; Aberdeen; the North-East Counties; Perthshire, Kinross-shire, and Angus; Lothians, Fife, and Stirlingshire; Lanarkshire and Clydeside; Ayrshire, Dumfries, Galloway, and the Borders; and, finally, the Highlands and
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".