page_title: The Sydney Morning Herald
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: The Sydney Morning Herald / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of the first edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. Hrvatski: Novosti.
context_page_description: The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily compact newspaper published in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and owned by Nine. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the Herald is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia and "the most widely-read masthead in the country". The print version of the newspaper is published Monday to Saturday and its sister newspaper, The Sun-Herald on Sunday.
context_section_description: In 1831 three employees of the now-defunct Sydney Gazette, Ward Stephens, Frederick Stokes and William McGarvie, founded The Sydney Herald. In 1931 a Centenary Supplement (since digitised) was published. The original four-page weekly had a print run of 750. In 1840, the newspaper began to publish daily. In 1841, an Englishman named John Fairfax purchased the operation, renaming it The Sydney Morning Herald the following year. Fairfax, whose family were to control the newspaper for almost 150 years, based his editorial policies "upon principles of candour, honesty and honour. We have no wish to mislead; no interest to gratify by unsparing abuse or indiscriminate approbation."
  During the 1890s Donald Murray, who invented a predecessor of the teleprinter, worked there.
  The SMH was late to the trend of printing news rather than just advertising on the front page, doing so from 15 April 1944. Of the country's metropolitan dailies, only The West Australian was later in making the switch. In 1949, the newspaper launched a Sunday edition, The Sunday Herald. Four years later, this was merged with the newly acquired Sun newspaper to create The Sun-Herald, which continues to this day.
  By the mid-1960s a new competitor had appeared in Rupert Murdoch's national daily The Australian, which was first published on 15 July 1964.
  In 1995, the company launched the newspaper's web edition smh.com.au. The site has since grown to include interactive and multimedia features beyond the content in the print edition. Around the same time, the organisation moved from Jones Street to new offices at Darling Park and built a new printing press at Chullora, in the city's west. The SMH later moved with other Sydney Fairfax divisions to a building at Darling Island.
  In May 2007, Fairfax Media announced it would be moving from a broadsheet format to the smaller compact or tabloid-size, in the footsteps of The Times, for both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Fairfax Media dumped these plans later in the year. However, in June 2012, Fairfax Media again announced it planned to shift both broadsheet newspapers to tabloid size, in March 2013. Fairfax also announced it would cut staff across the entire group by 1,900 over three years and erect paywalls around the papers' websites. The subscription type is to be a freemium model, limiting readers to a number of free stories per month, with a payment required for further access. The announcement was part of an overall "digital first" strategy of increasingly digital or on-line content over printed delivery, to "increase sharing of editorial content", and to assist the management's wish for "full integration of its online, print and mobile platforms".
  In July 2013 it was announced that the SMH 's news director, Darren Goodsir, would become Editor-in-Chief, replacing Sean Aylmer.
  On 22 February 2014, the final Saturday edition was produced in broadsheet format with this too converted to compact format on 1 March 2014, ahead of the decommissioning of the printing plant at Chullora in June 2014.
caption: The cover of the newspaper's first edition, on 18 April 1831
exif: {}