The Scottish Daily News (SDN) was a left-of-centre daily newspaper published in Glasgow between 5 May and 8 November 1975. It was hailed as Britain's first worker-controlled, mass-circulation daily, formed as a workers' cooperative by 500 of the 1,846 journalists, photographers, engineers, and print workers who were made redundant in April 1974 by Beaverbrook Newspapers when the Scottish Daily Express closed its printing operations in Scotland and moved to Manchester.

The redundant workers, who set up a Scottish Daily News action committee, contributed £200,000 of their redundancy money to set up the newspaper, with the British government promising a loan of £1.2 million to enable them to buy the Scottish Daily Express building in Glasgow at 195 Albion Street—a replica of the Daily Express's black-glass Art Deco offices in London's Fleet Street, dubbed the "Black Lubyanka"—if the committee could raise another £275,000. Around £175,000 of this came from members of the public in shares of £25 each, and just over £100,000 from Robert Maxwell, the owner of Pergamon Press.

The newspaper, which had as its slogan "Read the people's paper and keep 500 in jobs", folded after six months with a deficit of £1.2 million, but was published for another six months by a small group of employees who, led by journalist Dorothy-Grace Elder, staged the country's one and only newspaper work-in, writing and selling the paper themselves on the streets of Glasgow, taking no salaries, and refusing to leave the Albion Street building.

The first 16-page edition of the newspaper rolled off the presses as a broadsheet, as the Scottish Daily Express had been, at 9:50 p.m. on 4 May 1975, under the editorship of Fred Sillito, with Andrew McCallum as news editor, and 500 employee-shareholders. The journalists, based on the third floor of the Albion Street building, agreed to take a basic £69 a week salary and the editor £150. Dorothy-Grace Elder, later an early Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) from 1999, became the editor of the women's section. The first issue sold out at over 300,000 copies.

Although the broadsheet format was then believed by many employees to be a mistake, as reports had shown that the Scottish public preferred the tabloid format, the action committee, now called the executive council or works council, confidently expected circulation to fall to 220,000 within three weeks as the novelty of the newspaper wore off. However, circulation dropped further and more quickly than expected, reaching 190,000 in the third week. After taking returns into account, this produced an actual sales figures of less than 180,000, which meant that financial losses had begun to occur.

According to Christopher Hird in the New Internationalist, a feasibility study conducted by Strathclyde University before the paper began publication indicated that the average daily sale needed to be 200,000 to break even, and that the venture could not work given the costs and expected sales.

After the capital costs were taken into account, Hird wrote, the company had a start-up budget of only £950,000, a relatively small amount to launch a new paper.

By August 1975, losses were running at £30,000 a week with daily circulation down to 80,000, and it was decided to relaunch the newspaper as a tabloid, the first issue of which was published on 18 August with a print run of 240,000, priced at 5p.