Manchester businessman Mitchell Henry set up the Manchester Evening News on 10 October 1868. Originally a personal propaganda sheet by which Henry aimed to secure voters to elect him to parliament, when Henry failed to be elected the title was sold to Manchester newsmen, Peter Allen and his brother-in-law John Edward Taylor, under whom circulation increased. In 1879 the company moved from Brown Street to premises in Cross Street shared with the Manchester Guardian. The MEN’s strength lay in the number of classified advertisements placed by local businesses.

In 1924, John Russell Scott, elder son of the Manchester Guardian's C.P. Scott, bought the MEN bringing the newspaper under the same ownership as the Guardian.

By 1939, under the editorship of William Haley, the MEN had become the largest provincial evening paper in Britain. At the end of the Second World War, the MEN pulled off a national scoop by being the first paper to publish the news of the end of the war in Europe.

In 1963, the MEN acquired the failing Evening Chronicle, its main rival, producing a combined title with a daily circulation of around 480,000.

In 2010, the MEN was sold by the Guardian Media Group to Trinity Mirror and moved headquarters from Scott Place, Manchester, to the Trinity Mirror headquarters in Chadderton, Oldham.