WE live in the age of the template – all the news that’s printed to fit, as a colleague once said, making a play on the words of the New York Times’ motto: All the News That’s Fit to Print.
Templates are a pain in the tail for grizzled veterans like me.
This is because I was trained at the Scottish Daily Express during the 1960s, when it was selling at a remarkable 700,000 copies per day.
The Express had some of the best sub-editors around: legends like Clive Sandground, Bill Merrifield, Vincent Hastie, Matt Lynch and Ian Jack.
It also had the best news editor in Scotland in Ian Brown, the man they called the ‘Bomber’.
Daily Record contemporaries will, of course, argue that Fergie Millar deserves that accolade, but we can argue about that some other time over a pint in Tom’s.
