THE launch team was an eclectic bunch – mavericks, obsessives, intellectuals, scrappers. Some had the madness of genius about them, and others were just plain mad, but all of them were at the top of their game, and among the most talented journalists in the business. Many had already made their names, and those who hadn’t were about to get the chance.

There are too many names to list here but among those that stand out from the early days were Pennie Taylor, who joined as health editor from the BBC and remains to this day one of the go-to experts on the NHS; Connie Henderson, an unflappable news editor also brought in from the BBC; Torcuil Crichton, now the Westminster editor of the Daily Record and undoubtedly the most charming Gael to ever have left the western isles; Susan Flockhart, the former editor of the Big Issue in Scotland and an old-fashioned intellectual who brought real gravitas and intelligence to the newsroom; David Milne, a bright whip-smart young executive also from the Big Issue in Scotland who now looks after STV’s digital side; Lesley Riddoch, the voice of Scottish feminism and a big brain and big player in the nation’s media; Ron McKay, a hack’s hack, game for anything, and one of the best reporters to ever come out of Scotland; David Pratt, perhaps the most seasoned war reporter this country has ever produced and a man who has risked his life countless times to bring back to Scotland the truth about what is happening overseas; David Dick, known to the crew as Dave Vegas (too many of us spent far too much time when we weren’t at work at casinos and listening to cheesy lounge tunes) and another big talent who is now the editor of the Daily Record; Roxanne Sorooshian, one of the best production journalists in the game; Jane Wright, a brilliant magazine executive and a woman born to throw a good party; Alan Taylor, a literary flaneur and Scotland’s answer to Tom Wolfe; Ian Bell, perhaps the greatest Scottish columnist ever, now sadly dead at too young an age and a loss to us all; Donald Cowie, an unassuming and charming sports editor; Trevor Royle, a quintessential gentleman and military historian who became the paper’s diplomatic editor; Chris Furlong, a former soldier turned photographer with the eye of an artist and a big, kind, happy heart; former BBC anchor Iain Macwhirter, a man who knows more about Scottish politics than just about anyone alive; Pat Kane, pop star turned public intellectual; and Simon Stuart, a chief sub-editor who subjected copy to linguistic forensics and had a gift for hollering the most inventive expletives should a split infinitive or unnecessary pluperfect tense ever cross his desk – the man was a veritable Profanisaurus; he’s now an acclaimed psychologist after leaving journalism.

There were so many people, and so much talent over the years, that it is impossible to include everyone – but the early team was very special; almost like a little family. The team bonded quickly and supported each other like siblings, remaining friends to this day. It was a cast of characters that could have stepped off the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

Once recruited, the team gathered together before Christmas 1998 in the Black Lubyanka – the old Herald building on Albion Street. As its nickname suggests, this towering strange, black tile and glass, art deco-meets-brutalist monster was as charming as its namesake KGB prison in Moscow. The team holed up on the top floor – in a building that smelled of bad canteen food and cigarettes. Cigarettes played a major part in the early days with most staff taking it in turns to hang out of the toilet window for a lightning quick drag on a fag before racing back to their desks to finish a 12-hour day.

If the bricks and mortar were less than salubrious – the new Sunday Herald office was something different, something very modern: it was the first newsroom kitted out in day-glow iMacs, each desk dotted with a neon green, blue or red computer. Staff soon learned that each byline would be printed in the paper with an email address beneath. It may seem quaint now – but this was cutting edge, and it represented something very democratic, a way for readers to directly communicate with the writers in their paper of choice.

Staff at The Herald and the Evening Times – the Sunday Herald’s other sister paper – kept their distance, suspicious (and who can blame them) both of what changes the new paper might usher in for them, and of the loosening of corsets on the top floor. Not all Sunday Herald staff came to work in a shirt and tie, or a nice two-piece ladies’ business suit. There were strange rumours that some staff at the Sunday Herald were seen wearing jeans and even … trainers. This was Generation X taking over the newsroom, and not everyone was chuffed about it.

The Sunday Herald even had its own dedicated entrance at the Black Lubyanka – the separation was intentional, in order to preserve the distinct identity of the paper, but also so such sights as staff coming to work listening to headphones would not cause mass disgust on the other floors.

Before the first edition rolled off the presses in early 1999, all staff got together for a mass briefing from editor Andrew Jaspan. “I wanted to make sure everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet,” he says. The vision which Jaspan laid out to staff was this: the paper is being born at the fag end of the 20th century, so look forward, not back – embrace change and challenge yourself; and despite the changing and increasingly hectic and atomised way we live our lives in modern Scotland, Sunday remains a day distinct from the rest of the week, it is a day of relaxation, play, family and food – so amuse readers, give them some laughs along with the heavy news. Sunday newspaper readers are also notoriously promiscuous – hopping into bed with one paper one week because a free CD is being given away, but picking up a different paper the following week because of an investigation or big celebrity interview – so we had to give them a reason to fall in love and stay with us.

Jaspan had a few nice little metaphors to throw in as well. A Sunday newspaper is different, staff recall him saying, because the reader isn’t reading their paper on the train or over a hurried breakfast, they are reading the paper over a leisurely lunch, or at home on the couch, or even naked, in bed. “Arouse them!” Jaspan hollered. Sunday papers, Jaspan knew, relied on an element of "theatre" – journalism is the lowest rung of show business after all – so the Sunday Herald needed to stand out, be different and make readers stop and think.

Finally, Jaspan, told his team, everything could be boiled down to the four "I’s" – the paper must be independent of thought, intelligent, international in outlook and, when needed, irreverent to authority.

That was it – the staff had a few weeks to go before the revised launch date, February 7 1999, so they better go off and start finding stories and thinking up some good ideas. The next two Sundays saw the team work on two dummy editions of the paper, making sure the production system was right, that stories were being filed on time, and that the whole thing knitted together in one seamless chain from newsroom to corner shop. There was one casualty in those few weeks before the paper went live – a section head who was just a little bit out of their depth, and left before the heat in the kitchen got too hot for them. My one abiding memory of this time is of being cheated out of a cracking story I’d written making it onto the news stands. Our final dummy paper was to have a print run of less than 100 so staff – and only staff – could see what an actual physical edition of the Sunday Herald would look like. We spent Saturday as a live news day – each of us doing our jobs as if the paper would be in the shops the next morning. My beat was crime and terrorism. Around noon, I got a call that a big paramilitary player in Northern Ireland had been killed. I hit the phones and got details on the murder, the killers, the motive, pictures – the lot. The execs decided the story was the splash – but it was a splash that would never see the light of day.