News of swingeing cuts at the Daily Record and Sunday Mail appears to have taken many people in Scotland by surprise.

"We are absolutely shocked and stunned," said a National Union of Journalists official. An article on newsnetscotland said staff "spoke of the utter shock."

I can't fathom why this should be. Newspaper publishers have been cutting jobs for years, and there have been previous cuts at Trinity Mirror's Scottish operation.

Everyone in the business knows the economic situation has worsened, leading to a slump in advertising. (If they don't know, they don't deserve to be called journalists).

Then there are the papers' own circulation problems. Sales of the Record and Mail have been falling at a rapid rate for more than a decade.

In June 2001, the Record was selling an average of 596,000 copies a day. In April this year, the latest ABC figure, it sold just 312,000. That's a fall of 47.7%.

In the same period, the Mail has also lost 47% of its sale, down from 695,000 to 366,000.

The Scottish editions of the The Sun and the Daily Mail, now at 344,000 and 114,000 respectively, have eaten into the circulation of the once-dominant Record. The Daily Star sells 85,000 north of the border too. (Incidentally, the Record sells a mere 287,000 within Scotland).

In recent times, whenever I see the Record, I note two glaring problems - the design (it's a tacky explosion of colour) and the knee-jerk pro-Labour stance (a political anachronism in current times).

I cannot judge whether it breaks great stories and how it competes with its rivals because one needs to be in Scotland for a goodly time to assess the relative merits of news coverage.

But I can see that the Record, in concert with all the red-tops in Britain, has lost its way - and there is no apparent turning back.

So, and I know this is going to upset the journalists who work there (plus others who don't), there is no genuine point to the Record.

I have no especial brief for Trinity Mirror - as I must have made clear endless numbers of times on this blog - but its willingness to continue publishing the Record and Mail could be viewed as an act of charity.

In a sense, the publisher is running a sort of social welfare service for journalists. Its board knows, though it cannot admit it, that there is no real future for the Record and Mail.

It is managing decline. And the cuts are being made in order to ensure that the papers survive for longer than they really merit. Trinity Mirror directors won't thank me for saying what they cannot, but it is the reality.

Journalists in Scotland bemoaning their fate are seeing things the other way round. According to the newsnet posting, they think the Record and Mail "will be lucky to survive Trinity Mirror's savaging."

The truth is that the papers would not survive at all if there were no cuts. The business would go belly up.

As for another suggestion - that a Scottish buyer should acquire the papers from to save them from "an uncaring multi-national" - it is nonsense on stilts with a kilt on.

For more hot air from people who don't know what they're talking about, see quotes from Scottish MPs and MSPs, both Labour and Scot Nats.

PS: Lest anyone think otherwise, I am not lacking in sympathy with those journalists who will lose their jobs in these cutbacks. I sincerely hope they get good severance deals. They're going to need them.

Sources: newsnetscotland/NUJ (1) and (2)