Spend 70 pence on The Herald and expect to get the view from Scotland of Scotland, Britain and the world. For 225 years, its editorial team has been clear that what matters is, like property, location, location, location.

Spend 70 pence on The Herald and expect to get the view from Scotland of Scotland, Britain and the world. For 225 years, its editorial team has been clear that what matters is, like property, location, location, location.

There are those who may take issue with the view from headquarters in Glasgow being representative of the whole of Scotland. This is, after all, a small country with big cultural distances.

But for many in Britain there is little serious quality media located close to home, and they have to look to London as the location through which the provincials' view of their country and the world is mediated.

But is London the place to go if you want to understand Scotland better? Or even to understand the rest of Britain? I was asked to find an answer to such questions for the Tyneside incarnation of the Institute of Public Policy Research think tank, and the more I looked, the more London got in the way. In the over-centralised British nation, its media is among the most centralised elements, and its control of the national conversation by which we define ourselves means alternative versions of a geographically diverse Britain tend to get written out of the script.

This is not to make the case for buying newspapers edited from Scotland. In the pages of The Herald, that would be too obvious. This is to say that the dominance of London's media is unhealthy for its hinterland. A vibrant, successful city - perhaps the most international place on the planet - looks outward to the world, but struggles to make sense of the diversity and differing identities in its own backyard. It is at risk of being the capital of a country it barely knows. And while that contributes to the centrifugal forces of devolving Celts, it stifles the aspirations of the English regions.

When I went to Yorkshire, a few years back, to find out about the movement for devolution (now all but extinguished after ten years of John Prescott's bungling) its once reputable newspapers were diminished, while a search in a Leeds bookshop for local publications about contemporary Yorkshire turned up little beyond local history, railways and, of course, local railway history.

In 2004 I went to Newcastle and Middlesbrough to report on the referendum on a north-east regional assembly and found that the local media was no match for London's collective curled lip and its indifference to regional identity. There were lots of reasons for not voting "yes" that day, and lots of people used them, but having seen the Scottish media in full cry for home rule at the 1997 referendum, the most notable absence from the debate was a strong, assertive, broad-based north-east English media to articulate a shared discourse within the region about what it is, shares and aspires to be.

Last summer, when Hull was flooded, it was largely ignored while Gloucestershire got the attention. The local council set out to learn why. The answer came back that news desks in London are aware things have changed "up north", but having lost the industrial stereotype, they are not sure what the new story is.

Other research, carried out by Cardiff academics, suggests the transmission belt of local news into the nationals is not nearly as strong as it was. It compared election coverage in 1987 with 2005. When Margaret Thatcher was winning her third term, three-quarters of election stories were about local issues and candidates. By the time Tony Blair was going for his hat-trick, that was down to barely a third of election coverage, the remainder comprised of localised takes on national stories.

The need for a story obviously matters to those reporting news. And the story of Scottish devolution has had a mixed response from London editors. The new parliament encouraged several to invest in tartanised editions for Scottish readers, some more successfully than others. But in all those cases, Scottish stories are stripped out of editions for English readers.

They may have been fed every daily detail of the Democrat primary race - no harm in that - but that means less space to report on seismic changes going on in their own country. If Holyrood gets more taxation powers, the implications for the tax and spending distribution throughout the UK will probably be profound. Even when Gordon Brown backed that case earlier this year, it was barely mentioned outside Scotland. Anyone would be aware of soaring oil prices, but you would have to look hard in English papers to find the powerful impact that has in strengthening the SNP's case for Scottish independence.

There's not much of this that Google can't solve for those who want to find out. But the nature of the internet is to fracture audiences. Newspapers and broadcast news provide information across a range of issues. If they're doing their job, they tell you what you knew you needed to know, but their real value is in telling you Donald Rumsfeld's famous unknowns, both known and unknown.

And if devolved Scotland became a known unknown to much of London, it is less well-known now. As devolution inevitably creates differences, the London media's choices turn these into either indifference or ill-informed grievance about distribution of Treasury cash. Obviously, this should matter to those who want to keep the UK united. It should matter also to those who don't. When Alex Salmond says he wants Scotland to change its status as surly lodger to that of friendly neighbour, then the friendliness will require more mutual understanding and less surly grievance or indifference. Perhaps Scots should do more to get to know our nearest neighbours.

Don't expect London dominance to diminish. The challenge is to use the power of imagination - how different this country could be if the Guardian returned to its Manchester roots, if The Sun were edited out of Liverpool for, let's say, a year, if BBC flagship news based itself out of Leeds or Belfast and, yes, if The Herald decamped to Inverness for the entire shinty season.

The challenge is also to imagine the possibilities of alliances that do not have to work through London: where Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff work more closely together on shared interests rather than waiting for London to sanction a joint ministerial committee: where the devolved First Ministers find common cause with the powerful elected mayors of Bristol, Birmingham, and maybe even the Big Smoke's Boris Johnson himself.

• Douglas Fraser is author of Nation Speaking Unto Nation: Does the media create cultural distance between England and Scotland?, published online yesterday by IPPR North, available free at www.ippr.org