A half-penny evening newspaper, launched in Middlesbrough in November 1869. Reputedly the first half-penny evening paper in Britain, the Gazette was run on strong Liberal lines by its founder, Hugh Gilzean Reid. Its early format included only four pages of local news alongside "telegraphic news" from all parts of the world, but within weeks it claimed an impressive circulation of nearly 15,000 and soon began to include more pages. However, the paper never really took off until the mid-1870s, when Thomas Purvis Ritzema became the paper's commercial manager.
In 1881, the paper was renamed the North Eastern Daily Gazette, a title that was later shortened to the North Eastern Gazette. The present name, the Evening Gazette, was adopted in 1940.
Like most provincial newspapers in the Victorian period, the Gazette faced intense competition from other local papers. It nonetheless emerged in the 1880s as the pre-eminent paper of the Cleveland and Teesside region and, by 1890, its position was described as "unassailable".
Reid and Ritzema were astute businessmen who recognised the reading tastes of a predominantly working-class population centred on industrial Teesside. They embraced many of the classic features of "new journalism" long before the term was first coined by Matthew Arnold in 1887. Rather than serve their readers a heavy diet of political comment, they quickly adopted what contemporaries called a "magaziney" style, so that, in addition to ordinary news and editorial comment, there were serialised stories, ladies' columns, quips and cranks, puzzles and readers' competitions. By the early 1890s, it had a weekly circulation approaching 300,000.
Rising circulation levels required more efficient printing methods and in 1881 the Gazette was one of the first papers to adopt the new Marinoni presses that were capable of turning out 25,000 copies an hour. A second machine was later bought, which allowed the paper to produce its daily circulation of 50,000 copies. By 1909, the popularity of the paper on Teesside was assured: "It seems to be in the hands of every man, woman and child," commented Lady Bell in her study of local reading habits.
In 1926, the paper was acquired by Allied Newspapers Ltd. and then by Lord Thomson in 1959. Currently, it is part of the Trinity Mirror Group. 
Tony Nicholson © 2006
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