This is even more revealing than the data by party.
Scottish party leader coverage during the campaign, across Scottish and UK papers.

Alex Salmond has received more coverage than every other Scottish party leader apart from Nicola Sturgeon.

1/

A man heading what is at best a 3% party is mentioned more often than the Tory leader or the Labour leader by every paper, apart from the Scottish Daily Mail which has given equal coverage to Ross and Salmond.

2/

It is even worse in English papers, where Salmond has received more than twice as much coverage as the Tory or Labour leader.

3/

On average, Salmond received 3 times as much coverage as the two Scottish Green leaders combined in Scottish papers, 8 times as much in English papers.

5 times as much as Harvie and 12 times as much as Slater in Scottish papers, 19 and 20 times as much in English papers.

4/

Hell, even George Galloway (of that party nobody votes for) received more coverage than Slater and the same as Harvie in English papers.

5/

The media attention to Salmond is a travesty and has no justification. It is entirely born out of media desperation to find a personality focus and conflict narrative.

6/

Even pro-Tory and pro-Labour papers do not manage to pay more attention to the leaders of the parties they support than to somehone who is politically irrelevant, and whose irrelevance is born out by poll after poll.

7/

Remarkably, there is something close to proportionality in the ratio of articles about Sturgeon and Ross/Sarwar. She gets between 2.5 and 3 times as much coverage which is not far from how the SNP vote share compares to Con and Lab.

8/

And there is also meaningful partisan bias in this. A Labour-supporting paper like the Daily Record gives Sarwar more space than Ross, while Tory-paper like the Scottish Daily Mail or Telegraph give over-proportional coverage to Ross.

9/

But all that falls down when it comes to the Scottish Greens or indeed the Alba Party.
Apart from the National (for obvious reasons) even Rennie gets more coverage than the two Green leaders combined.

10/

Given the outrageously over-proportional coverage he has received, Salmond's and Alba's performance in the polls is an abject failure, and testament to the lack of appeal. They could not have hoped for a more conducive environment and yet have made no headway.

11/

In contrast, given how the Scottish Greens have been almost entirely ignored, they are over-performing.

12/

But there should really be lessons for the Scottish and UK media from this.

Which obviously won't be learned.

13/end

PS: the data are from a Nexis search and give the number of articles in each newspaper during that time period which mention the full name of a party leader.