A district reporter who was a “suberb role model” for young journalists has died eight days after his 90th birthday.

Tributes have been paid to Bob Carter, who began his career at the Banffshire Journal and later made his name at Aberdeen dailies the Press & Journal and Evening Express.

Bob spent 34 years as the Banff district office reporter for the sister titles and was also known for his Around Banffshire column, which ran weekly in the Evening Express for decades.

He retired from reporting in 1991, but maintained a “keen and often critical interest in the newspaper world”.

John Thomson, a former colleague who knew him for more than 40 years, told the P&J: “Bob was a superb role model for the many young reporters who worked with him in Banff.

“His death really does feel like the end of an era.”

Bob left school at 16 and began work in 1947 as a “pupil reporter” at the Banffshire Journal.

His sister Alyson, his solve surviving sibling, said: “He had to master shorthand up to 100 words per minute and touch-typing, and his pay for a five-and-a-half-day week was 20 shillings.”

Bob joined the Aberdeen dailies in 1957 and married his wife Margaret, who he had met when they both worked at his first newspaper, four years later.

Margaret died in 2011, shortly after their golden wedding anniversary.

Bob’s ashes were interred at his wife’s grave at Myrus cemetery, Macduff.