Yesterday evening a gathering took place in Glasgow pub The Drum and Monkey as old friends and admirers paid tribute to the recently deceased Raymond Jacobs.

A marvellously intelligent man and extremely fine writer, Raymond graced this newspaper’s pages for several decades, principally as one of the most respected golf correspondents of his generation.

He was also part of a group of men to whom I will be forever grateful for welcoming a youngster into their fold in the eighties after my appointment as golf and rugby correspondent for The Dundee Courier and Evening Telegraph and both his humour and word craft would be summed up in the most under-stated fashion when what would become a regular fourball first took place and myself and a fellow twenty-something challenged him and Jock MacVicar who were then in their fifties.

“Ahhh… hims ancient versus hims modern,” he mused.

By an odd coincidence just a few days earlier I had, for the first time in many years, bumped into Kevin McKenzie, the former Scotland hooker and during our brief chat he had registered his sadness on hearing of the death of Norman Mair, Raymond’s long-time counterpart at The Scotsman.

I had to tell him Norman had actually died a couple of years ago, but immediately knew why he had wholly understandably thought it to be more recent because his fellow former Scotland international Jamie Mayer had posted one of those Facebook anniversary notices a day or so earlier, recounting Norman’s passing.

Right enough, a subsequent check of Jamie’s message revealed that Kevin had responded, observing in typically ascerbic fashion: “What a lovely man – for a journalist. Always encouraging and honest with no grudge to bare. Remember him from my school days right through the nineties and beyond. Total gentleman.”

That description could have been applied to most of those golf writers I got to know in the eighties, but contrasted sharply with some of the sentiments expressed following the death last week of another well known journalist, AA Gill of The Sunday Times.

That news was broken to me by one of his most fervent admirers who had been shocked not only by the discovery of his death, but by the readers’ comments appended to the online article in which she read of it, many less than kind and some even vitriolic.

Gill was as brilliantly humorous and insightful a writer as any in Britain in the past 30 years, but unlike Norman and Raymond, had no qualms about telling it like it is to the point of being deeply hurtful if he felt it appropriate and he consequently divided opinion.

His huge popularity among younger generations perhaps speaks, though, to how appetites have changed since the days when fine writing alone was sufficient. When it comes to critical analysis within journalism the emphasis is placed ever more heavily on the first of those words.

In that context, then, it is interesting not only that he was, rather bizarrely, one of a trio of actors recently voted the most trusted people in the USA, but that Denzel Washington should address that subject with due gravitas when invited to comment upon the trend towards what are described as ‘fake news stories.’

“What is the long term effect of too much information?” he asked rhetorically, before answering: “One of the effects is the need to be first, not even to be true anymore, so what a responsibility you all have (said nodding towards an assembled media pack) not just to be first but to tell the truth. We live in a society now where it’s just first, who cares. Get it out there… we don’t care who we hurt, we don’t care who we destroy, we don’t care if it’s true. Just say it… sell it.

“Anything you practise you get good at… including BS,” Washington concluded.

Things have not changed as much as we might be tempted to think since Hims Ancient confronted Hims Modern, given that Ronnie Reagan was on America’s throne back then and, daft as his status among his compatriots may seem, the words of the man who shares his surname with America’s first President rang true.

Personally, rather than racing to be first to report rumour and speculation, my preference has been for a mantra often attributed to another of Raymond and Norman’s fabled contemporaries, the football writer John Rafferty who would apparently proclaim: “It’s not true until I’ve written it.”

Arrogant as that may sound it can be interpreted as speaking to the difference between proper journalism, which seeks, as fairly as possible, to get to the truth of matters and modern social media’s ugly race to be first at all costs.

With Hugh McIlvanney having recently retired no modern sportswriter’s prose comes close to matching the elegance of some of those past greats, but there is still scope for journalists to be authoritative, if they take the time and care to want to.