I came out as trans nine years ago this week, and I think it’s interesting to look at the transition – not mine, but the transition in the Scots press’s reporting on LGBTQ+ issues and trans people during that time.

Here’s a fairly typical piece from The Herald in the summer of 2016, which covers “culture war” issues but makes it very clear that the anti-LGBTQ+ voices are an unrepresentative minority; it gives more space to the people trying to make the world better than to the ones determined to make it worse.

Today, The Herald (and The Scotsman, and most of the wider media) is editorially anti-LGBTQ+, its columnists rabid and its online comments cesspools.

What’s changed? I’d argue that a big part of it is because the ad money and profit that used to keep newspapers publishing now goes almost entirely to Google and to Facebook’s parent, Meta. Online ad revenues are in freefall, with more and more outlets competing for less and less money. And many newspapers are now owned by companies that care little for journalism, companies that consolidate and cut until all that remains of once-great publications is their masthead.

That has left newspapers, already experiencing plummeting circulations as print media dies, desperately trying to attract online page views by any means necessary.

The Herald doesn’t publish ABC circulation numbers any more, but in 2023 its circulation was just 12,928 – down from 28,900 in 2016. The Scotsman is similarly reticent, but in 2022 its average circulation was under 9,000 people – only half of which were over-the-counter sales; many copies are given away for free in hotels and airports.

Many newspapers have pivoted to a digital-first strategy based on turning journalists into “content providers” and “more closely mirroring social media” (in the words of the chairman of The Scotsman’s parent company) rather than traditional journalism.

This is something I wrote about in Small Town Joy in the context of local papers not covering local music any more (with some exceptions): local newspapers in Scotland will barely or rarely cover local artists but will publish online articles about US pop star Taylor Swift in the hope of attracting rogue Google traffic.

There was a particularly ghoulish example of that this week when the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, a very small circulation newspaper only covering the north west coast of Ayrshire in Scotland, was publishing agency stories online about the terrifying hurricane in the Caribbean, which is quite some distance away from readers in Kilbirnie.

As the gutter press has long demonstrated, one of the most reliable ways to make money from journalism is to make people angry and confirm people’s prejudices. That’s particularly true online. A nice article won’t have people battling in the comments section all day long and won’t be shared in furious Facebook posts or excerpts on X, but one demonising asylum seekers or trans people or the “woke” will. The newspapers know this, which is why they have embraced a business model I call The Three Cs: clicks and comments from… you can guess the third c-word.

It’s an evolution of the old mantra, “if it bleeds it leads”: fill the page with rage.

This is doing terrible damage.

Those papers may not be bought by many people, but they are read religiously by the researchers and producers at the BBC, who scan them for stories to fuel that day’s phone-ins and magazine shows and who have their writers in the “usual suspect” database of rent-a-gobs (a database I was also on for over two decades: once you’re on it your phone rings regularly). And they are read religiously by politicians, and by the people who want to influence those politicians, and shared by the people on social media who want to make you furious and hateful. So they’re a central part of the outrage industry that gives disproportionate attention to some of the very worst people and helps push their agendas.

The outrage industry is most damaging to the people being demonised, of course. But it also damages wider society.

We are becoming an angrier, less tolerant, more selfish country. And our newspapers and broadcasters are playing a huge part in driving that change.

If you want to worry about transitions, worry about that one.