With the arrival of the dailies, established weekly papers faced a huge challenge. One of the first casualties was Glasgow's oldest Liberal paper, the Glasgow Chronicle. It had first appeared in 1811. Since 1840 the proprietors were the heirs of one of the founders, William Kippen of Busby, and the editor was Michael Thomson, a licentiate of the United Presbyterian Church. It tried to go daily in 1855, but the experiment lasted only a month. It reverted to a Wednesday weekly and was the first to publish theatrical criticism in 1856. However, it folded in 1857, by which time circulation had fallen to less than 1,000.

The cantankerous Peter Mackenzie continued to battle with many in his Reformers’ Gazette, which could date its roots back to 1831. In 1856 it became the Glasgow Gazette and reforming zeal gave way to Palmerstonian bluster, calling for bullets rather than missionaries in India after the revolt, but it also continued to rage against fraud and dishonesty. As Mackenzie's obituary in the Evening Citizen recalled, he was a natural fighting man who was always more or less in conflict. Time and again he faced libel actions and, in 1857, presumably with bankruptcy threatening, the copyright and plant were unsuccessfully offered for sale. The Gazette was still around for, and presumably was assisted by, the interest in the trial of Madeleine Smith and, by 1858, Mackenzie was back in control. He did very briefly try to turn the paper into a daily, but it eventually succumbed in July 1864. It had been brought down, he believed, by the penny papers that ‘were taking the legs from under the old established weeklies’ and he had lost more money in the last three years ‘than he would like to tell and would probably be believed’. But, belligerent to the last, he ‘defied any human being to show he had prostituted his pen for filthy lucre of base-born bribes’.

William Forbes, who was active in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, tried to launch a Scottish Journal in October 1856 ‘to supplant those publications of doubtful tendency that emanate weekly from London’, and to counter the imitation of ‘English fashions and ideas’, but it failed to get beyond a single issue.