An insider’s look at the past 50 years in Scottish newspapers has been published in a new book by Harry Reid, former editor of The Herald.

DEADLINE: The Story of the Scottish Press is a personal account of Harry’s time in newspapers, and looks back at some of the biggest scoops and rivalries during that time.

It also examines how the press dealt with the great pillars of Scottish identity – religion, education and law – as well as politics.

The book was inspired by the makers of a six–part BBC Scotland television series, Deadline, which will be broadcast for the first time on Tuesday.

Each of the programmes will examine a different period in the history of the Scottish press, and the book extends that, with comments and memories from many journalists which have not been included in the programmes.

Harry, who stepped down from his role at The Herald in Glasgow in 2000, also recalls his time working under editors Sir Alastair Dunnett, Eric Mackay, Charles Wilson, Arnold Kemp and George McKechnie.

Looking back to the 1960s, Harry writes: “Those were days when, more than now, the readers appreciated their newspapers, identified with them and took pride in them. And the people who produced these papers regarded themselves as special.

“If that sounds cocky – well, cockiness was part of the game. Scottish journalism was full of bravado, mischief and mystique; you could cover a story about a noxious and malodorous smell emanating from a derelict pit bing, as I once did, and still sincerely feel that there was something glamorous and exciting about what you were doing.”

And he has also gathered anecdotes from friends and colleagues such as John McGurk, who has edited the Edinburgh Evening News, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman, who recalls one particularly embarrassing moment when he was trying to make conversation with a local minister.

He said: “I went to this minister, and I was trying to get a story, and on his sideboard there’s a picture of Ken Dodd, who was a pretty popular comedian at the time.

“To try and break the ice, I say: Ken Dodd, is that someone you know? And he looked at me and looked at the picture, looked back at me and said, ‘That’s a photograph of my wife’.”