Yorkshire Evening Post

About Yorkshire Evening Post

The Yorkshire Evening Post — known to its readers simply as the YEP — is the daily evening newspaper of Leeds, published in the city since 1890. A tabloid owned by National World through Yorkshire Post Newspapers, it is the populist sibling of the broadsheet Yorkshire Post, with a Labour-leaning outlook and an unmatched record of covering Leeds United, Leeds Rhinos and Yorkshire County Cricket Club. In August 2025 its circulation was 2,702.

History and founding

The paper was first published on 1 September 1890 by the Yorkshire Conservative Newspaper Company Limited, which already published the Yorkshire Post and wanted an evening companion to it. Its main competitor was the Yorkshire Evening News, which folded in 1963. In 1925 the YEP produced a separate edition for South Yorkshire, printed simultaneously in Doncaster; it closed in 1970 and became the Doncaster Evening Post, which itself folded in 1983.

In 1967 United Newspapers Ltd merged with the Yorkshire Conservative Newspaper Company Limited to form Yorkshire Post Newspapers, enabling a move to new £5 million premises on Wellington Street in 1970. The paper's history is preserved in the British Newspaper Archive, which holds digitised editions from 1890 to 1988 — nearly 440,000 pages, a unique record of Leeds life across a century.

Ownership

Johnston Press bought the Yorkshire Evening Post and the Yorkshire Post in 2002 for £570 million. After Johnston Press's collapse, the titles passed to JPI Media in 2018 and then to National World in 2021; in 2025 National World's shareholders approved a £65.1 million takeover by Media Concierge. The YEP is published by Yorkshire Post Newspapers from Whitehall Road in Leeds, where journalists moved in 2012 when Johnston Press closed the Wellington Street headquarters and shifted printing to Dinnington near Sheffield. The Wellington Street premises were demolished from 2014, though the tower was spared.

Editorial stance and coverage

Unlike its conservative broadsheet sister, the Yorkshire Evening Post has a liberal, centre-left outlook — historically aligned with Labour. Despite a title suggesting county-wide coverage, it is firmly a Leeds paper, though widely read in Bradford, Harrogate, Huddersfield and Wakefield. Its defining coverage is sport: generations of Leeds United supporters have read the YEP's match reports, transfer news and columnists as the authoritative voice on their club, alongside close reporting of rugby league's Leeds Rhinos and Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Beyond sport it covers Leeds City Council, West Yorkshire Police, the courts, business and the city's cultural scene.

Notable editors and journalists

The current editor is Laura Collins. Previous editors include Peter Charlton, who took charge of both the YEP and the Yorkshire Post when Johnston Press merged the titles' editorial operations in 2012, with correspondents writing for both papers, and Jeremy Clifford, who led the paper's 125th-anniversary relaunch in 2015. The YEP's sports desk has been one of the most influential in regional journalism, its Leeds United correspondents read as oracles by the club's vast fanbase.

Circulation and readership

The YEP's print circulation illustrates the wider crisis of the regional evening press: from 61,332 in the first half of 2006, to 26,038 in early 2014 (down 16.5 per cent year-on-year), to 2,702 in August 2025. The evening newspaper — once the second paper of the day in every major city — has been among the hardest-hit categories in British publishing, as readers moved to 24-hour online news and the commuter market that sustained evening titles eroded.

Print and digital editions

The paper is published daily as a tabloid. Its website, yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk, carries breaking Leeds news, live sports blogs and the National World network's shared content. In January 2015 the paper underwent a "lighter, brighter" redesign for its 125th anniversary year, with new guides to the city's shopping, eating and drinking — an attempt, in editor Jeremy Clifford's words, to make the YEP "a better newspaper than it has ever been". The relaunch reflected the title's repositioning as a cheerful champion of 21st-century Leeds rather than a traditional evening paper of record.

Supplements and magazines

The YEP has long published magazines, property and motors supplements, and famous football season specials. Its 125th-anniversary celebrations in 2015 included the redesign and a year of commemorative content looking back to the first edition of 1 September 1890. The paper's archive — from Victorian Leeds through two world wars to the Leeds United glory years — is among the richest resources for the city's historians.

Controversies and criticism

The YEP's modern history is bound up with the traumas of its corporate owners: the debt-fuelled Johnston Press era, the administration of 2018, and the successive redundancy rounds that shrank the Leeds newsroom. The 2012 merger of the YEP and Yorkshire Post newsrooms under a single editor was criticised by some as diluting the distinct identities of the two papers. Like all National World titles, it faces questions about the balance between cost-cutting, automation and editorial quality — though the company points to growing revenues as vindication of its strategy.

Awards and recognition

The Yorkshire Evening Post has won regional press awards for its journalism, particularly its sports coverage, which is regarded as among the finest in the English regional press. Its 125th anniversary in 2015 was marked as a civic occasion in Leeds, a testament to the paper's place in the city's identity.

The YEP and Leeds United

No newspaper-club relationship in English regional journalism is closer than the YEP's with Leeds United. The paper chronicled Don Revie's all-conquering side of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the wilderness years that followed, the Howard Wilkinson title triumph of 1992, the financial collapse and relegation of the 2000s, and the Marcelo Bielsa revival that returned the club to the Premier League in 2020. Generations of Leeds fans have judged managers and players through the YEP's verdicts, and its United correspondents — past and present — are among the best-known sports journalists in the North. The paper's rugby league coverage of the Leeds Rhinos and its reporting on Yorkshire County Cricket Club give it an authority across all three of the city's sporting religions.

135 years of Leeds life

The YEP's archive is a social history of Leeds: the Victorian mills and back-to-backs of its early decades, the interwar suburbs, the Blitz, the post-war rebuilding, the rise of the universities, the transformation of the city centre from industrial hub to financial and legal centre to the "Knightsbridge of the North" shopping destination. The paper's photographers captured it all, and the British Newspaper Archive's digitisation of nearly 440,000 pages from 1890 to 1988 has made that visual record accessible to historians and family researchers. The 125th anniversary in 2015 — marked by the "lighter, brighter" redesign under editor Jeremy Clifford — was celebrated as a civic milestone, a recognition that the Evening Post belongs to Leeds in a way few institutions do.

Outlook

With print circulation under 3,000, the YEP's future — like that of its sister titles — depends on National World's digital strategy and the Media Concierge ownership's willingness to invest. The paper's greatest assets are its brand, its sports authority and its bond with Leeds. For 135 years it has told the city's story back to itself, from the Victorian mills to Elland Road. The challenge now is to keep telling it in a form the next generation of Leeds readers will pay for.