Scottish Daily News

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 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",—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," folded after six months with a deficit of £1.2 million, 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.

The first 16-page edition of the newspaper rolled off the presses as a broadsheet, as the Scottish Daily Express had been, at 9:50 p.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.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.

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