Cumbernauld News: The Weekly Newspaper Born with Scotland's New Town
The Cumbernauld News is a weekly newspaper for Cumbernauld in North Lanarkshire, Scotland. It is published today as the Cumbernauld News and Kilsyth Chronicle, a combined title that serves both Cumbernauld and the neighbouring town of Kilsyth, together with the villages between them. The batch listing for the title gives its website as cumbernauldtoday.co.uk, and its publisher as Iconic Media Group, the company formerly known as National World.
Few local newspapers can date their birth as precisely, or tie it as closely to the birth of their town, as the Cumbernauld News. It was created in June 1961 by the Falkirk Herald, less than a week before a rival paper for the new town appeared, and a surviving photograph of its front page from Friday 2 June 1961 is held in the Falkirk Council collections. The News won that first contest for readers, outlasted its rival, and has chronicled Cumbernauld's growth from a planned new town into one of Scotland's largest towns ever since.
Overview
The Cumbernauld News serves Cumbernauld, a new town in North Lanarkshire between Glasgow and Falkirk, and, in its combined form with the Kilsyth Chronicle, the older town of Kilsyth and the settlements lying between the two. That pairing gives the paper an unusual patch: a post-war planned town of modernist housing and a famous town centre, joined in a single title with a much older neighbouring community with its own distinct identity.
The paper is a paid weekly, published in tabloid newspaper tradition as part of a group of Scottish local titles. It has long been a sister paper of the Falkirk Herald, the title that founded it, and its journalism now appears online through its publisher's websites, where Cumbernauld stories sit alongside coverage from across the central belt of Scotland. Its listed print circulation in recent Audit Bureau of Circulations figures was small, a reminder of how far the audience for Scottish weeklies has shifted from print to digital.
History
The Cumbernauld News began with the new town itself. Cumbernauld was designated as a new town to receive population overspill from Glasgow, and as its first neighbourhoods filled, the Falkirk Herald created a small local paper for it, the Cumbernauld News, in June 1961. The timing was competitive: less than a week later, the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser started its own title for the town, the Cumbernauld Courier. Local readers mostly bought the News, and the Courier eventually closed, leaving the News as the town's established paper.
The Kilsyth side of the present title has older roots. The Kilsyth Chronicle was the established local paper for Kilsyth and its surrounding area, with archive holdings of the Chronicle recorded from the late nineteenth century onwards. In time, in an attempt to boost the sales of both papers, the Chronicle and the News were joined as one paper for both towns, creating the combined Cumbernauld News and Kilsyth Chronicle that is still published today. The two titles have remained sister papers alongside the Falkirk Herald within the same publishing stable.
A Paper in a Film
The Cumbernauld News holds a small but genuine place in Scottish film history. In 1977 the Cumbernauld Development Corporation sponsored a comedy promotional film, Cumbernauld HIT, in which the newspaper features largely in the plot. The film, which has echoes of The Avengers and Taggart, concerns an evil woman's plan to hijack the new town with a bio-weapon, and the attempts of journalists from the fictionalised Noddy News to stop her.
The film includes many shots of the old Cumbernauld town centre and of the inside of the Cumbernauld News offices as they were in the 1970s, making it an accidental visual archive of both the town and the paper in their early decades. The National Library of Scotland holds the film, and its existence underlines how central the News already was to the identity of the young town: when the development corporation wanted to tell a story about Cumbernauld, it told it through its newspaper.
Ownership and Publisher
For most of its life the Cumbernauld News belonged to the publishing group built around the Falkirk Herald. That group, F. Johnston and Company, was renamed Johnston Press in 1988 and grew into one of the United Kingdom's largest regional newspaper publishers, and the News and the Kilsyth Chronicle were published within its Scottish portfolio. When Johnston Press collapsed, its titles passed in 2018 to JPIMedia and then, in 2021, to National World, which became the owner recorded for the combined title.
National World has since been renamed Iconic Media Group, following its change of ownership, and the directory listing for this title records Iconic Media Group as its publisher, published alongside the Kilsyth Chronicle. Iconic, formerly National World, describes itself as one of the leading local media groups in the UK and Ireland, and in 2026 it announced significant recruitment of journalists and commercial staff across its portfolio of more than 130 local news brands, with a stated aim of returning reporters to local newsrooms and appointing dedicated editors for titles.
Coverage and Content
The combined paper covers the full range of local life across its two towns: North Lanarkshire Council decisions affecting Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, planning and development in a town still shaped by its new town layout, schools, health services, crime and court news, local business, and community events in the villages between the two towns. Kilsyth coverage draws on the Chronicle's long tradition of reporting its own town's affairs, while the News reports a patch defined by post-war housing areas, the town centre and Cumbernauld's road and rail links to Glasgow and Falkirk.
Sport and community reporting form the other main pillars of the title. Local football and other grassroots sport in Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, school achievements, charity efforts and the work of voluntary groups all feature in the mix that readers of Scottish weeklies expect. Online, Cumbernauld stories are presented within the publisher's wider Scottish and Glasgow-area coverage, which gives local stories a route to a much larger digital audience than the print edition alone could reach.
Community Role
The Cumbernauld News was created because a new community needed a newspaper of its own. In a town that had not existed a generation earlier, the paper provided one of the first shared institutions: a weekly record in which new residents could read about their new schools, churches, clubs and council, and see their new town treated as a place with its own news rather than as an extension of Glasgow or Falkirk. Winning the contest with the Cumbernauld Courier in its first weeks gave that role to the News from the very start.
The merger with the Kilsyth Chronicle extended the same function to the combined title. Joining the papers was a commercial decision taken to boost sales, but it also linked two neighbouring communities in a single weekly record, and the combined paper has continued to serve both towns and the villages between them. For Kilsyth, whose Chronicle had served the town for generations before Cumbernauld existed, the arrangement preserved a local title that might otherwise have struggled to survive on its own.
Print and Digital Presence
The Cumbernauld News and Kilsyth Chronicle continues as a weekly print title, and the batch listing for the Cumbernauld News gives cumbernauldtoday.co.uk as its website. In practice, the combined title's digital presence has also been carried within its publisher's larger platforms: recent reference listings for the combined paper point readers to the publisher's Glasgow World website, reflecting the way National World, now Iconic Media Group, consolidated many Scottish local titles into city and county-wide sites.
That structure means Cumbernauld and Kilsyth stories appear online alongside news from across the Glasgow city region and Scotland, organised under the publisher's national and city brands, while the historic local names are retained in print. It is a pattern repeated across the group's Scottish weeklies, in which the printed masthead preserves the identity readers know, and the website trades on the scale of the wider network to reach readers who search for news by town, topic or breaking story rather than by newspaper name.
Audience and Reach
Audit Bureau of Circulations figures reported for the combined Cumbernauld News and Kilsyth Chronicle put its print circulation at 400 copies as of 2023. That is a strikingly small number for a paper serving two towns, and it illustrates the transformation of Scottish local news: the audience that once bought the weekly in large numbers now overwhelmingly encounters its journalism online, through search, social media and the publisher's websites, where readership is measured in page views rather than copies sold.
The figure should be read in that context rather than as a measure of the title's relevance. The combined paper remains the dedicated weekly for Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, and its stories feed a digital audience far larger than its print sale. Iconic Media Group has said its portfolio of more than 130 local news brands averages well over 100 million page views a month across the group, and it is within that networked audience, rather than in the newsagent's bundle, that the Cumbernauld News now principally reaches its readers.
Recent Developments
The major recent developments for the Cumbernauld News have been changes at group level. The title passed from Johnston Press's successor companies to National World in 2021, and National World has subsequently been renamed Iconic Media Group, the publisher recorded for the title today. Under its new name the group has announced a pivot back towards community-focused local journalism, including a recruitment programme creating new editorial roles across its portfolio and, in 2026, additional commercial roles to work with local businesses.
For a title founded in 1961 to serve a brand-new town, the continuity is notable. The Cumbernauld News has outlasted its first rival, absorbed a partnership with the Kilsyth Chronicle, passed through the rise and fall of Johnston Press, and emerged under new ownership with its name and its patch intact. Its print sale may now be small, but the paper that a Falkirk publisher launched in the new town's first years remains, in print and online, the Cumbernauld title its first readers chose.
