Catriona Stewart: It's time to say goodbye to the Glasgow Times

Actually, it's not fairly terrible - it's just plain terrible.

When I started working at the Evening Times, as we were then, I had never heard of the paper before. Not only had I never heard of it, I had a weird mental block that stopped me retaining the name in my head for more than five minutes at a time.

What I used to do, as a cheat, was keep a copy of the paper next to my desk phone so that when I picked up a call I could glance at the mast head and read it out.

"Hello, Evening Times?"

Now, 13 years later, it's goodbye Glasgow Times.

This is my final week and it's bizarre to me when I think how, from not knowing the paper at all, it has become such an integral part of my life.

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I think of all the opportunities I've had thanks to the Glasgow Times and I can't quite believe or understand my good fortune.

As might be apparent from the fact I didn't know the paper until I stepped through the door of the office, I fell into journalism in what turned out to be an extremely happy accident.

When I was a student I worked in Starbucks near to the former offices of The Herald and Glasgow Times, STV and the Daily Mail. Shereen Nanjiani, then the main STV news anchor and now BBC radio host, was a regular customer (tall mocha Frappuccino) and she, extremely kindly, set me up with work experience.

I was a clueless teenager from Coatbridge with no idea that the world of newspapers or television might be one for me, but almost from the moment I set foot in the STV studio I knew that journalism was all I wanted to do.

It was not a great start. I remember with some horror asking the extremely famous John McKay, who had deigned to stop and speak to me, what he did for a job.

Undeterred - and determined to do my research - I mooched work experience from the Scottish Daily Mail news editor (double tall semi-skimmed latte), going in for one week's work experience and hanging about for five years.

From there, I was offered shifts at the Evening Times and, again, didn't know when to leave. I was given a staff reporter job in 2009 and somehow 13 years have flown by.

What a brilliant job, what a brilliant city.

I've had the opportunity to travel: I've been on press trips to Serbia and Mauritius and the Cayman Islands. And Fort William.

I've been to refugee camps on the Myanmar–Thailand border and travelled to Sierra Leone to write about the lack of maternity provision in the country.

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But the world is in Glasgow and the past decade has given me a world of experience.

When each reporter was given a community patch, I was given the South Side. Or, as is now our house style, the Southside. It's obviously the best patch in the city and I embraced it so fully that I now also call it home.

The Southside came with Govanhill, at the time a community in Glasgow that was quietly going about its business. Govanhill has since become one of the most talked about, widely reported on, politicised areas of Scotland - perhaps the UK - and working there has been a highlight of my career.

I've made dear friends, good contacts and quite a few enemies with, I hope, balanced and wide-ranging coverage of the area's issues.

I've been our paper's court reporter, covering front page High Court trials alongside shedding light on the types of smaller scale stories that few papers still have the resources to cover.

My role as education reporter also opened up the chance to do justice to the amazing work in our city's schools, giving plaudits where they're due to innovative schemes helping transform education in the city.

Over the past decade parents have increasingly stopped moving out to the suburbs when it's time for their children to start school and the improvements in attainment have been a joy to watch.

When I arrived in newspapers it was at a transitional point where sexism was still rife and the drinking culture still well established. We were not, let's say, discouraged from a drink at lunchtime. In fact, on one less than respectable day, the news editor took a group of us for wine at lunchtime.

Several glasses of red in, I had a call telling me to hop in a taxi and head to the McGhee's factory in Sighthill. Why? Because the then-prime minister David Cameron was there and someone had to go to and interview him.

Times have changed, the culture's changed and the job has vastly changed. The website wasn't something I ever had to be concerned about, social media didn't exist and video content was a cutting edge novelty.

I look at the younger reporters coming in to the office now and admire their multi-disciplinary skills. My new colleagues are bright and focused and, while I'm desperately sad not to be working with them any more, I can't wait to see how they help shape the future of the paper.

Glasgow is an incredible city and the Glasgow Times remains its most faithful champion. I'm so grateful to it, and grateful to our readers. 

Thank you, and bye for now.