THE Sunday Herald has become the first newspaper to publicly back a Yes vote in the independence referendum.
The front page of our sister paper stated: "Sunday Herald says Yes" and was decorated with a giant thistle and saltires in a design by Alasdair Gray.
An editorial in the paper, which said it would remain balanced in its reporting, said it was asserting a claim to a "better, more decent, more just future in which a country's governments will be ruled always by the decisions of its citizens". Editor Richard Walker said: "We have been weighing up the arguments and it would be fair to say we have been moving more towards a Yes position. When we had decided that we had made up our minds it seemed the honest thing to do would be to tell our readers.
"There are a lot of papers are weighing up their decisions and a number which are explicitly in the No camp. There is none in the explicitly Yes camp, until today.
"In a properly functioning democracy, people should be able to have a variety of views. It seemed right to do something to alleviate that deficit. We want to promote a grown-up, reasonable debate about this."
Managing Director of the Herald & Times Group, Tim Blott, said: "Our policy is to give individual editors the freedom to decide their own newspaper's position on this hugely important constitutional issue but our official company stance will remain non-political and neutral in the independence debate."
The Herald's editor Magnus Llewellin said: "The Herald will at present continue to be neutral in the independence debate."
HeraldScotland incorporates content from both print titles and also publishes a balanced range of online-only articles relating to the referendum.
Our readers' forum is a neutral commenting facility and our moderating team will remain impartial in the independence debate and will enforce our posting rules rigorously.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
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