The Manchester Evening News is a British daily newspaper published each week day evening and on Saturdays. It distributed in Manchester and surrounding areas. The paper vies with the Coventry Evening Telegraph as the second best-selling evening newspaper in the country after the Evening Standard. Both newspapers sell around 160,000 copies per day, and are read by approximately 400,000 people, making the Manchester Evening News the most widely read publication in the region.
Mitchell Henry was educated in London and at University College Cambridge where he read for a degree in medicine, eventually becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
Upon the death of his father in 1862 he returned to his native Manchester to run the family firm, but by 1868 he had decided to enter politics - he was particularly keen to champion the cause for a better health provision for the poor. After a somewhat shaky start and poor poll positions, he stood as an independent candidate in the first General Election after the Reform Act. Better funded and publicised opposition candidates prompted him to found the Manchester Evening News, helped by a senior employee of the Manchester Guardian, which he intended more as an organ for political self-promotion than the long-lived newspaper which it was to become. The first evening edition appeared on 10th October 1868 and cost ½d (a ha'penny, or half of one old penny).
In the event, Mitchell Henry withdrew his candidacy from the poll, and it was to be another three years before he was elected Member of Parliament for the County Galway constituency of Northern Ireland.
Mitchell Henry went on to sell the Manchester Evening News (MEN) to John Edward Taylor, the son of the founder and owner of the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian). Taylor brought his brother-in-law Peter Allen in as a partner in the Evening News. After Taylor's death in 1907 the Guardian was sold to its editor C. P. Scott while the Evening News passed into the hands of the Allen family. Scott's Guardian bought the Evening News in the 1920s. From that time the two newspapers have always had a common owner - it is currently one of 62 newspapers owned by the Guardian Media Group.
