RIP Cable magazine, a much-needed voice in Scottish media. I’ve been following Cable since the launch and have been consistently impressed by the quality and breadth of Scotland’s premier foreign affairs magazine. While all good things must come to an end, Cable’s end was sooner than expected, lasting just under a year.

Nobody could dispute the quality of Cable’s writers, and it was a valuable addition to our media output. But despite an impressive readership, Cable depended on voluntary subscriptions. You can give out free samples at the deli counter to drum up interest, but that doesn’t work for media.

A combination of factors – a crowded marketplace, a lack of objective quality control meaning the wheat and the chaff are mixed in together, and a lack of respect for media – are making it difficult for plucky upstarts and established press outlets alike to drum up enough money to run and flourish.

Plenty of clever business folk have been trying to find a solution but it’s difficult to square the circle that says we expect news, opinion and polemics for free, and we expect them to be of the same quality as the paid-for versions.

It’s a rare person who actively seeks out opinions and news that runs counter to their own world view. We – I can be guilty of it myself – seek out opinions that mirror our own, stories that back up what we already know, and are wary of criticising outlets on our own “side” when it seems like a great wave is perpetually poised to smash against our reasoned group.

I blame the nursery tales. OK, maybe that’s facetious but hear me out. We grow up with stories where the good guys always win despite the insurmountable odds, and when we get older, films and TV tell us the same thing. Instead of nuance and reason, we’ve ended up with discourse that pretty much says the other side is evil incarnate.

Cybernats versus Yoons, Brexiteers v Remoaners, and so on. Instead of debating ideas, we box shadows. And with this comes a narrow Me v Thee way of looking at things, where we pick and choose the kind of news stories we want to believe instead of looking at the facts. A lot of that is down to the media, of course – papers and websites have an agenda but the good ones have traditionally managed to at least try for a bit of balance. But with the tightening of the purse strings, we’ve seen a narrowing of focus.

Maybe we get the media we deserve. Maybe in this age of junk food journalism, paying to read the same news somewhere else is as worthy (and unpopular) as a kale salad. It’s a chicken and egg scenario, and not one that’s going to be solved anytime soon.

Good journalists aren’t going to work for free – and nor should they. Instead of rejigging press releases, they need time to make contacts, pursue leads, and craft pieces that enrich our society, worry the politicians, and inform the public.

They can’t do that while the creeping spectres of redundancies, crushing deadlines and inaccurate rivals are hovering at their shoulder. The turnaround is tight and the budgets are even tighter.

This isn’t a polemic against online media or clickbait. Clickbait serves a purpose – it can drive traffic to a website and in turn to the long-read pieces, and to my mind Buzzfeed (for example) is a seriously underestimated news resource.

But wilfully inaccurate pieces that spread gossip or untruths for the benefit of some shady organisation, what good do they do in the long term? They poison the well, and the decent media has to rush to play catch up, dragging itself down in the process or losing out entirely.

Cable, you’ll be missed. But I have every hope of seeing you return in the future, along with a huge selection of exciting, accurate, and – crucially – well-funded Scottish journalism.