The Manchester Evening News is a huge regional brand, but that size isn’t always matched by its visibility to referrers. While global platforms play a major role in how people discover news, the content they surface isn’t always the most accurate, useful, or even from the right source. Over the course of 2025, the MEN set out to revolutionise their features and investigations operation, build their social audience, and launch a premium product for paying customers. All of this stemmed from a strategy of reconnecting with readers, building a new audience, and making sure they were visible to target readers.

The MEN’s journalism exposes wrongdoing and drives change and, as such, the team want it to be read by as many people as possible. In 2025, they set out to build on their reputation for investigations to win new audiences. They revealed a prominent YouTuber’s sordid past, exposed fake shops and dark suicide websites, reported on a far-right group celebrating Hitler’s birthday, and uncovered a paedophile living beside a playground. When terrorism struck, they broke the news of the synagogue attack in Crumpsall on Yom Kippur, reporting from within the Jewish community while countering misinformation and helping maintain calm.

This focus on high-quality, insightful coverage fed into the launch of a premium product in November 2025. The team have since signed up thousands of paying customers in an environment where news was widely regarded as being free.

Elsewhere, the MEN have tackled issues with referrer visibility through expanding their audience on other platforms. TikTok remains their fastest-growing audience. The team have seen a 64% increase in followers in the last 12 months alone, and their current following now stands at just shy of half a million. In that same timeframe, they have achieved over 231 million views. Since their strategy was altered to include text graphics as a way of driving website traffic in June 2025, the account has generated over 280,000 link clicks, and since the end of September has consistently brought in on average 20,000 page views per week. Analytics show that 60% of those followers are under 35.

The MEN reached more than 12 million unique users in September 2025, up 44% year-on-year, with 69.4m monthly page views, a 25%. In January, the MEN reached 11 million readers.

Their social media audience continues to grow rapidly on TikTok where videos have been viewed more than 231million times through 2025. The MEN’s suite of newsletters generates 1.5 million pageviews a month, while their network of WhatsApp channels drives 365,000 pageviews.

The numbers are impressive, but so is the journalism.

The team have investigated, campaigned, and changed the law. Every day, they connect with new audiences and build a more meaningful relationship with readers through their premium subscription product.

150 years after its launch the MEN is innovating, representing, and leading the conversation in Greater Manchester. And this transformation over the last 12 months is a testament to a remarkable and talented editorial team.

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