The Sydney Morning Herald started as a 750-copy weekly in 1831
Three employees of the Sydney Gazette launched a four-page weekly in 1831 with a print run of just 750. Renamed The Sydney Morning Herald after John Fairfax bought it, it became Australia's oldest continuously published newspaper, and his family controlled it for almost 150 years.
Ward Stephens, Frederick Stokes and William McGarvie founded the Sydney Herald, which went daily in 1840. The next year the Englishman John Fairfax bought it and gave it its current name in 1842, promising editorial policies founded on candour, honesty and honour, with no wish to mislead through abuse or flattery. Donald Murray, who invented a forerunner of the teleprinter, worked there in the 1890s, and a weekly Page for Women edited by Theodosia Ada Wallace appeared in 1905.
It was slow to modernise in some ways. Only on 15 April 1944 did news replace advertising on its front page, and among Australian metropolitan dailies only The West Australian switched later. A Sunday edition arrived in 1949 and merged four years later with the newly bought Sun to form The Sun-Herald, still published today. From 1964 it faced a national rival in Rupert Murdoch's The Australian. For its 150th anniversary in 1981, the Fairfax company gave Sydney the Tank Stream Fountain sculpture.
The website launched in 1995. After abandoning an earlier plan, Fairfax Media shrank the paper from broadsheet to compact size in 2013, alongside its Melbourne sister The Age, while cutting 1,900 jobs across the group and putting up paywalls. The last broadsheet Saturday edition came out in February 2014, just before the Chullora printing plant closed. Amanda Wilson became its first female editor in 2011.
Now owned by Nine Entertainment, the Herald claims to be the most widely read masthead in Australia and is considered a newspaper of record. It is generally described as the most centrist of the country's three major papers, and in 2004 its editorial page named market libertarianism and social liberalism as its guiding themes. Supplements such as Good Weekend and lift-outs covering food, property and motoring fill out the week.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
