Sunderland Echo

The Sunderland Echo is an evening newspaper serving the Sunderland, South Tyneside and East Durham areas of North East England. The newspaper was founded by Samuel Storey, Edward Backhouse, Edward Temperley Gourley, Charles Palmer, Richard Ruddock, Thomas Glaholm and Thomas Scott Turnbull in 1873, as the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette. Designed to provide a platform for the Radical views held by Storey and his partners, it was also Sunderland's first local daily paper.

The inaugural edition of the Echo was printed in Press Lane, Sunderland on 22 December 1873; 1,000 copies were produced and sold for a halfpenny each. The Echo survived intense competition in its early years, as well as the depression of the 1930s and two World Wars. Sunderland was heavily bombed in the Second World War and, although the Echo building was undamaged, it was forced to print its competitor's paper under wartime rules. It was during this time that the paper's format changed, from a broadsheet to its current tabloid layout, because of national newsprint shortages.

The Echo is published Monday–Saturday and is part of the Johnston Press group—one of the United Kingdom's largest publishers of local and regional newspapers. As of June 2012, the paper had an average daily circulation of 29,366, with around 75,000 readers, and a very active website. It retails at 55 pence. The Echo shares its HQ at Echo House, Pennywell Industrial Estate, Sunderland, with sister papers the Hartlepool Mail and Shields Gazette.