FIRST of all, a huge thank you to all who bought our launch issue last week. We’re still crunching the numbers but it’s safe to say our sale of 19,000 combined print and digital exceeded expectations.
We did our best to get enough copies in shops but demand can be difficult to predict. As it was, around 1000 shops sold out. Apologies if you were among those who could not buy a copy. We’ll be increasing our supply this week so hopefully those problems will not happen again.
As ever, if you are having difficulty finding the Sunday National – or indeed the daily National – don’t hesitate to let us know.
Thank you also to the hundreds of readers who told us how much they enjoyed our first issue. We are very proud of our relationship with our readers and we’re happy that will broaden and deepen with the addition of more from the Sunday National. We hope you enjoy our second issue today, although our front page story makes for disturbing reading.
Opposing fracking is a perfectly reasonable position to take. Indeed the Scottish Government has made sure fracking does not take place within our borders.
It’s hard to see, then, the justification for labelling those who have demonstrated against fracking “domestic extremists” and even more difficult to accept that the police could infiltrate communities around Grangemouth to gather intelligence on those “extremists”.
The tactics on anti-fracking demonstrations were adopted by the force’s second chief constable, Phil Gormley, who left his post in February this year.
The news that his successor was to be Iain Livingston was warmly received by many of Gormley’s critics. Hopefully he will now reconsider how the police regard and treat those who have made known their views on fracking by taking part in public demonstrations.
If he doesn’t there will be several in the upper echelons of the political world happy to explain why he’s wrong.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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