Raymond Carr: What the KD Media acquisition means for SCN readers

Yesterday our parent group, Hero Media & Entertainment, announced the acquisition of KD Media, the Edinburgh events company behind some of Scotland’s most established awards programmes, including the Scottish Home Awards, the Scottish Property Awards and the Scottish Legal Awards.

It is a significant moment for the group, and it matters to our readers more than most acquisitions would.

Scottish Construction Now has always been part of a wider family of titles, alongside Scottish Housing News, Scottish Legal News, Scottish Financial News, and ScottishNews.com. This now also includes Daily Business. Each one is the daily read for its profession. What has changed is what now sits alongside that journalism. As of yesterday, the group also owns the events business that hosts many of those same sectors’ biggest nights of the year.

For the built environment, the offer is now complete. SCN and Scottish Housing News lead the news agenda every morning. The Scottish Construction Summit at the SEC in October and the Scottish Housing Summit within that event will bring the industry together at scale. Also in the near future, our sponsored roundtables and business breakfast mornings will carry the senior-level conversations in between.

The Scottish Home Awards and Scottish Property Awards, fixtures in the industry calendar for the best part of two decades, now give the sector its nights of celebration under the same roof. From the morning bulletin to the awards stage, no other media business in Scotland covers that ground.

The legal side deserves particular attention because law is one of construction’s great pillars. Contracts, procurement, planning, disputes and finance mean there is barely a project in Scotland that moves without lawyers at the table. Many of the firms our readers work with every day are the same names found in Scottish Legal News and on the shortlists at the Scottish Legal Awards. Bringing Scotland’s premier legal awards into the same group as its legal news title, and alongside SCN, connects the built environment to its professional advisers in a way no one else in the market can offer.

The thread running through all of this is a simple one. Construction does its business face-to-face. Projects run for years and depend on dozens of partners, so trust matters more than anything, and trust is not built over email. The conversations that genuinely move a business forward happen at a roundtable, over breakfast, on an exhibition floor or at an awards dinner.

Our journalism gives you the daily picture. Our events put you in the room. After yesterday, we can do both at a scale nobody else in Scotland can match, and we look forward to seeing you in one of those rooms soon.

• Raymond Carr is commercial director at Hero Media & Entertainment, publisher of Scottish Construction Now and organiser of the Scottish Construction Summit (SEC Glasgow, 22 October 2026). For partnership and sponsorship enquiries, get in touch via raymond@scottishnews.com.