If you’re a regular at Glasgow Sheriff or high court then chances are you will have read the work of this mystery man. He is the brains behind, and editor of, The Digger, the weekly magazine that is proving the public still has a growing appetite for real crime stories. Steven Raeburn tracked down The Digger to find out more about his life with crime.

He’s out there. He works the streets alone, taking on drug dealers, gangsters, hoodlums and criminals. Where he goes, the police follow, picking up the pieces of the mess he has exposed. He watches the courts, the housing schemes, gathering evidence that puts the bad guys away. He is the thorn in the side of the establishment, seeing what neither criminals nor the Justice system want him to see. He is Batman, with a pen. And on top of all this, he is a single-handed publishing phenomenon, combining word of mouth buzz with punter-friendly journalism that has yielded a weekly circulation of 12,000. Meet the man who is The Digger.
If you live outside the grittier parts of Glasgow, you may indeed never have heard of it. The Digger appeared three years ago in a few corner shop newsagents. It is an A5 text-heavy pamphlet that looks like a tabloid, but without the breasts and bingo. It is a newspaper, but unlike any you will find anywhere else. No adverts. No Paris Hilton. No TV listings. What you do get is 12 pages of tightly packed text with a spare smattering of pics -usually taken by the Digger himself – comprising mostly reporting from the streets, the High Court and Sheriff Court, telling the readers who has been convicted of what.
He also prides himself on exposing street level criminals and catching them in the act. The issue to hand the day The Firm met up with him shows a photo of a named young man, photographed apparently in the act of selling drugs. It is risky in every sense, but he says the police frequently follow up on what they read in The Digger. Many of his readership love him for it. He’s cleaning up the streets, they say.
And this is the real genius of The Digger. It is distributed in the high crime areas of Glasgow. The readers are the very victims of the people who feature. He argues that this is a public service, and the original purpose of journalism. He has a point, hasn’t he? Anecdotally we have all heard complaints about the newspapers being filled with celebrity nonsense that no one is interested in. And their sales figures are in consistent decline. The Digger’s are rising with ritual certainty.
The magazine is easy to pick up, but tracking down the Digger himself – whose Clark Kent persona is mild mannered journalist James Cruickshank – carries an air of intrigue. There is an address on the back page, but stated to be a mail box number only. Secrecy, it turns out, is essential to the magazine’s, and possibly Cruickshank’s personal survival. But he agrees to meet without difficulty, and over a brew in a café in the shadows of Glasgow’s High Court, we talk.
“It’s old fashioned crime reporting, that’s all it is,” he says. “They all did this years ago; they don’t anymore. I started doing it because I moved to Possil in 2002, and had been a freelance journalist for a while. The stories I liked doing, you couldn’t get them into the paper. I knew I would be able to find more crime stories in that area.”
Indeed, in the not too distant past, local Court reports featured prominently in most if not all local newspapers, a feature that has been scaled back as groups like Trinity Mirror have bought up and homogenised the titles, closing branch offices and reducing staff. Larger titles, bought by groups such as Gannett or Johnstone Press have fallen into similar traps.
“I have to admit, I have a lot of contempt for newspapers like the Evening Times, the Daily Record and the Herald because they are failing in their duty as a reporting organisation,” he says.
“They have completely failed the community. Maybe because of advertising, or their relationship with the institutions of Glasgow. Glasgow is a big city. There are a lot of people here and a lot of things going on. You wouldn’t know it to read the papers.”
Cruickshank graduated with a degree in philosophy before moving into journalism, building a career through freelance work and regular employment with the mainstream titles. The Digger was formed when an accumulation of late payment for his work and a continued dissatisfaction about his inability to get his crime stories published, spurred the creation of his own title, but not all at once.
“All the papers I was working for, I just sued them for non payment of wages, and then that was it. It gave me some money to get some equipment,” he says. “Because I was freelancing, I was trying to get word out on to the street that I wanted to buy news. I made up these calling cards, and was coming up with different names, and putting these calling cards through doors to see if I could drum up some business,”
“Then it dawned on me that I am trying to put a message across on this business card; why don’t I make a leaflet, and instead of a message, put the news on it and see if I can sell it?”
And sell it he did, in a formula so simple it bring a smile to JJ Hunsecker. It is sold in 209 shops across Glasgow, although that number is rising. It is a crime weekly. And people are buying into the straightforward formula.
In marketing parlance, this is the mag’s USP, and the secret of its success. Beginning with distribution in crime ridden Possil, where Cruickshank lived at the time, it is now sold across Maryhill and the north side, Dennistoun, Parkhead and Rutherglen towards the east, and south of the river into Pollokshields and beyond. The reach is widening, as those directly affected by street crime want to know all about who is doing it. Much to the shame and disgrace of the perpetrators.
“Petty crime is really interesting for the person next door,” he says. “Who is slashing car tyres? Who is smashing windows? What I realised about the demand for it is that they [the criminals] don’t care about the police, they don’t care about authority figures. What they do care about is their granny down the road. They really care about that. Well I’m selling these crime stories to the granny, the sister and the mother. They don’t want you to tell their mums.”
“It is about telling people things that some people don’t want told. I think they need to know about it. I am not saying I am making any difference, but I know there is a need for it.” Apparently so, if his claims that the police are using the magazine as a source of information are correct.
“Although the police would never admit it, I know they follow up the magazine and they follow up stories that we do, and I know there are arrests based on stuff we write about,” he says.
Some have criticised The Digger for containing unsubstantiated gossip, or innuendo. A read at a random edition will confirm that the mag does contain allegations which have not been proven in court. Undoubtedly, he goes further than any mainstream papers, all sensitive to defamation claims and mindful of the PCC Code of Practice. But it does, Cruickshank argues, tell the truth. He is robustly confident in the veracity of what he publishes. And nobody has won a defamation case against the mag.
\"There are only two ways they can stop the magazine – one is through legal action and the other is to shoot me,\" he told the BBC, who profiled the publication earlier this year. He speaks from experience of both.
“I have been threatened. All the time. My theory is, these people have been so involved with drug dealing, they live pretty chaotic lives, from drama to crisis, and drama to crisis. I’ll be an issue for them for 48 hours, then I’m forgotten,” he says.
“There have been some scary moments though. [convicted gangster, who we won’t name] sent two people round to my house to knock down the door. They then appeared at court and waited for me outside court. I got a gut feeling something wasn’t right about these two guys. That stuff can make your heart beat. There could be things that would drive me away from the magazine, but it wouldn’t be that.”
His enemies come from within the established structure too. He has been banned from entering the Sheriff Court in Glasgow, a ban which was subsequently challenged and lifted. This, he says, was an attempt by his rivals to snuff out the magazine.
Despite this distraction, the paper is gaining a degree of legitimacy, having been approached by legal firms who are keen to advertise in its pages. With rising sales, more outlets stocking the paper, and a staff of six on the books, progression is definitely forward. Cruickshank says he is applying lessons from a similar publication he masterminded over 20 years ago, which on reflection he looks at as almost a blueprint for the present day Digger.
“All the mistakes I made in 1986 I made sure I wasn’t going to make them in this one. In 1986 I was pulling my punches,” he says. “The worst thing a journalist can do is self censorship, so the story never really gets out. I knew I was doing it in 86. I’m not doing it this time.”
You have been warned.