The Scottish Daily News (SDN) was a left-of-centre daily newspaper published in Glasgow between 5 May and 8 November 1975. It was hailed as Britain's first worker-controlled, mass-circulation daily, formed as a workers' cooperative by 500 of the 1,846[1] journalists, photographers, engineers, and print workers who were made redundant in April 1974 by Beaverbrook Newspapers when the Scottish Daily Express closed its printing operations in Scotland and moved to Manchester.
The redundant workers, who set up a Scottish Daily News action committee, contributed £200,000 of their redundancy money to set up the newspaper, with the British government promising a loan of £1.2 million to enable them to buy the Scottish Daily Express building in Glasgow at 195 Albion Street—a replica of the Daily Express's black-glass Art Deco offices in London's Fleet Street, dubbed the "Black Lubyanka"[2]—if the committee could raise another £275,000. Around £175,000 of this came from members of the public in shares of £25 each, and just over £100,000 from Robert Maxwell, the owner of Pergamon Press.
The newspaper, which had as its slogan "Read the people's paper and keep 500 in jobs",[1] folded after six months with a deficit of £1.2 million,[3] but was published for another six months by a small group of employees who, led by journalist Dorothy-Grace Elder, staged the country's one and only newspaper work-in, writing and selling the paper themselves on the streets of Glasgow, taking no salaries, and refusing to leave the Albion Street building.
Broadsheet
The first 16-page edition of the newspaper rolled off the presses as a broadsheet, as the Scottish Daily Express had been, at 9:50p.m. on 4 May 1975, under the editorship of Fred Sillito, with Andrew McCallum as news editor, and 500 employee-shareholders. The journalists, based on the third floor of the Albion Street building, agreed to take a basic £69 a week salary and the editor £150.[4]Dorothy-Grace Elder, later an early Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) from 1999, became the editor of the women's section. The first issue sold out at over 300,000 copies.
Although the broadsheet format was then believed by many employees to be a mistake, as reports had shown that the Scottish public preferred the tabloid format, the action committee, now called the executive council or works council, confidently expected circulation to fall to 220,000 within three weeks as the novelty of the newspaper wore off.[5] However, circulation dropped further and more quickly than expected, reaching 190,000 in the third week. After taking returns into account, this produced an actual sales figures of less than 180,000, which meant that financial losses had begun to occur.
According to Christopher Hird in the New Internationalist, a feasibility study conducted by Strathclyde University before the paper began publication indicated that the average daily sale needed to be 200,000 to break even, and that the venture could not work given the costs and expected sales.[3]
After the capital costs were taken into account, Hird wrote, the company had a start-up budget of only £950,000, a relatively small amount to launch a new paper.[3]
Relaunch
By August 1975, losses were running at £30,000 a week with daily circulation down to 80,000, and it was decided to relaunch the newspaper as a tabloid, the first issue of which was published on 18 August[6] with a print run of 240,000, priced at 5p.
Few of the workers had experience of publishing a tabloid, and by the end of August, losses were lower, running at £17,000 a week, but with circulation down to 170,000.
Losses
On 15 September 1975, 300 of the workers attended an emergency meeting set up by Robert Maxwell, who accused the management of the newspaper of playing politics with the workers' jobs, in part because, he said, they were refusing to allow managers to manage and were blocking a price rise that Maxwell felt might save the newspaper[7] The result of the meeting was that two of the managers were removed from the executive council and replaced by two of Maxwell's appointees, Dorothy-Grace Elder and Tommy Clarke.
The losses continued, made worse on 19 September when Beaverbrook began legal action to recover £59,000 the company said was still owed on the sale of the building. The litigation destroyed what was left of the newspaper's financial viability and credit was no longer available. Bills had to be paid immediately, journalists no longer had lines of credit for taxis and petrol, photographers had to pay up front for photographic supplies, and the accounts department became swamped with demands for payment from nervous creditors.[8]
Final days
During the final days of the newspaper, its content became self-obsessed, with appeals to the Scottish people to save their own newspaper[9] The editor was forced out, and a new editor appointed, Nathan Goldberg, a communist and the newspaper's former night editor, who took over on 6 October. When asked how he felt about this, he compared himself to the captain of the Titanic, thereafter becoming known as "Nathan Iceberg".[9]
The government refused to extend any additional loans to save the newspaper, or to give up its secured creditor status on the loan for the building, which would have meant the newspaper could have raised money using the building as collateral.
During a workers' meeting on 20 October 1975, with circulation running at 150,000 a day, the company chairman Alistair Blyth announced that a provisional liquidator, James Whitton of Coopers & Lybrand, had been appointed to take over the running of the newspaper as administrators, with the aim of saving it rather than continuing the liquidation process.[10] Whitton's options were to sell the newspaper as a going concern, find new investors, or split up and sell the assets. The advantage of having a liquidator sanctioned by the courts on board was that the newspaper's credit was guaranteed and salaries could be paid.
The next day, 21 October, members of the executive council met Prime Minister Harold Wilson to ask again, without success, that the government's loan conditions be relaxed.
On Saturday, 1 November, the workers held a rally in at Custom House Quay attended by several hundred employees and members of the Scottish National Party (SNP), where speakers appealed to the government to save the newspaper and the 500 jobs. Those who addressed the rally included Teddy Taylor of the Conservative Party, Margo MacDonald of the SNP, Jimmy Reid of the Communist Party, and representatives of the Scottish Trades Union Congress as well as ministers of Catholic and Protestant churches.
Chairman Alister Blyth told the rally:
[A]nyone in the newspaper industry will tell you ... that it takes at least a year for a newspaper to become established, get on its feet to settle its circulation. It became clear that we were under-financed from the start ... This was aggravated, of course, by the fact that we came out with the wrong size of newspaper.[11]
On 6 November, the liquidator announced that he would be winding up the newspaper in two days' time.
Work-in
At a workers' meeting on 7 November 1975, the remaining employees, led by Dorothy-Grace Elder, decided to stage a work-in by refusing to leave the building, and by writing and selling the newspaper themselves on the streets of Glasgow, with the printing handed over to an outside commercial printer because the Albion Street presses were no longer running. A small group of employees stood outside factories and stores at five o'clock every morning shaking tin cans and asking for donations, a situation that continued for six months until, needing to earn a living, workers began to leave, putting an end to Scotland's experiment in worker-controlled news production.
For six months, we held that building – technically, illegally. The old black glass Express building was worth millions.
We were the first newspaper workers' co-operative and we worked for free for six months in the freezing and abandoned Albion Street plant, producing a rebel paper we wrote and sold ourselves on the streets.
Throughout, I dreaded the day the phone would ring to tell us the police would be sent in to re-claim the building (then part owned by the Labour government and with a council interest also).
"Oh please don't send in the police. We can't risk violence. This is a peaceful work-in," I said before he had a chance to speak. "Police? We could – but we won't," replied McCann. "Councillors wouldn't do that to Glasgow folk who are protesting peacefully. I was just phoning to say I guess your work-in must be hungry since your canteen closed. So you've all to come round to the Corporation canteen, get a cheap dinner and say I sent you if there's any bother".[12]
Albion Street building
The category-A listed building at 195 Albion Street was later used by the Glasgow Evening Times and, from July 1980, by The Glasgow Herald, whereupon it became known as the Herald building. The nine-storey building, built by Beaverbrook in 1937 and extended in 1955,[13] was refurbished in 2004 at a cost of £25 million[14] and turned into an apartment block housing 149 apartments.[15][16]
The history of British newspapers dates to the 17th century with the emergence of regular publications covering news and gossip. The relaxation of government censorship in the late 17th century led to a rise in publications, which in turn led to an increase in regulation throughout the 18th century. The Times began publication in 1785 and became the leading newspaper of the early 19th century, before the lifting of taxes on newspapers and technological innovations led to a boom in newspaper publishing in the late 19th century. Mass education and increasing affluence led to new papers such as the Daily Mail emerging at the end of the 19th century, aimed at lower middle-class readers.
James Sillars is a Scottish politician and campaigner for Scottish independence. Sillars served as a Labour Party MP for South Ayrshire from 1970 to 1976. He founded and led the pro-Scottish Home Rule Scottish Labour Party in 1976, continuing as MP for South Ayrshire until he lost the seat in 1979.
James Reid was a Scottish trade union activist, orator, politician and journalist born in Govan, Glasgow. His role as spokesman and one of the leaders in the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in between June 1971 and October 1972 attracted international recognition. He later served as Rector of the University of Glasgow and subsequently became a journalist and broadcaster. Formerly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Reid was later a member of the Labour Party. He moved on to supporting the Scottish Socialist Party in the late 1990s, then joined the Scottish National Party in 2005 and gave his full support to the idea of Scottish independence. He died in 2010 after a long illness.
The Daily Express is a national daily United Kingdom middle-market newspaper printed in tabloid format. Published in London, it is the flagship of Express Newspapers, owned by publisher Reach plc. It was first published as a broadsheet in 1900 by Sir Arthur Pearson. Its sister paper, the Sunday Express, was launched in 1918. In June 2022, it had an average daily circulation of 201,608.
The Daily Record is a national tabloid based in Glasgow, Scotland. The newspaper is published Monday-Saturday while the website is updated on an hourly basis, seven days a week. The Record's sister title is the Sunday Mail. Both titles are owned by Reach plc and have a close kinship with the UK-wide Daily Mirror as a result.
Dorothy-Grace Elder is a Scottish journalist and former Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the Glasgow region 1999–2003. She sat as an Independent MSP 2002–2003, having first sat as a Scottish National Party member from 1999 until she left the party in 2002. Among achievements for campaigning, she was awarded the 1996 Britain's Reporter of the Year for investigative journalism at the British Press Awards. In 2019, she was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Scottish Press Awards.
The Scotsman is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its parent company, JPIMedia, also publishes the Edinburgh Evening News. It had an audited print circulation of 16,349 for July to December 2018. Its website, Scotsman.com, had an average of 138,000 unique visitors a day as of 2017. The title celebrated its bicentenary on 25 January 2017.
The Herald is a Scottish broadsheet newspaper founded in 1783. The Herald is the longest running national newspaper in the world and is the eighth oldest daily paper in the world. The title was simplified from The Glasgow Herald in 1992. Following the closure of the Sunday Herald, the Herald on Sunday was launched as a Sunday edition on 9 September 2018.
The Sunday Herald was a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published between 7 February 1999 and 2 September 2018. Originally a broadsheet, it was published in compact format from 20 November 2005. The paper was known for having combined a centre-left stance with support for Scottish devolution, and later Scottish independence. The last edition of the newspaper was published on 2 September 2018 and it was replaced with Sunday editions of The Herald and The National.
The Sunday Mail is a Scottish tabloid newspaper published every Sunday. It is the sister paper of the Daily Record and is owned by Reach plc.
The Glasgow Times is an evening tabloid newspaper published Monday to Saturday in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. Called The Evening Times from 1876, it was rebranded as the Glasgow Times on 4 December 2019.
Catherine Mario Ullrich was a Scottish politician who was a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the West of Scotland region from 1999 to 2003. A prominent member of the Scottish National Party (SNP), she was an early supporter of the political career of Nicola Sturgeon, who later became First Minister of Scotland.
Garnock Way was a short-lived Scottish soap opera, produced by Scottish Television for the ITV network, running from 1976 to 1979. It was replaced by Take the High Road which also featured actors Eileen McCallum, Bill Henderson, Paul Kermack, Michael Elder and John Stahl.
John Fingland Mason is a Scottish National Party (SNP) politician who has served as the Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Glasgow Shettleston since 2011.
The Daily Express Building is a Grade II* listed building located in Fleet Street in the City of London. It was designed in 1932 by Ellis and Clark to serve as the home of the Daily Express newspaper and is one of the most prominent examples of art-deco / Streamline Moderne architecture in London.
The Evening Citizen, was an evening version of The Glasgow Citizen. It was first published in August 1864, was one of the first of three evening newspapers to be printed, published and sold in the Glasgow area of Scotland. Both papers were founded by James Hedderwick.
Yes Scotland was the organisation representing the parties, organisations, and individuals campaigning for a Yes vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. It was launched on 25 May 2012 and dissolved in late 2014 after Scotland voted against independence.
The National is a Scottish daily newspaper owned by Newsquest. It began publication on 24 November 2014, and was the first daily newspaper in Scotland to support Scottish independence. Launched as a response to calls from Newsquest's readership for a pro-independence paper in the wake of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, it is a sister paper of The Herald, and is edited by Callum Baird. Initially published on weekdays, a Saturday edition was added in May 2015. The National is printed in tabloid format, and is also available via online subscription.
Neil Charles Gray is a Scottish politician who has served as Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development since 2022. A member of the Scottish National Party (SNP), he has been the Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Airdrie & Shotts since 2021, having previously been an Member of Parliament (MP) for the equivalent Westminster seat from 2015 to 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
