The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) is a daily newspaper owned by Nine Entertainment published in Sydney, Australia in tabloid format. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the Herald is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia and claims to be the most widely read masthead in the country.[2] It is considered a newspaper of record for Australia.[3][4] Its sister publication is The Age, published in Melbourne.
The newspaper is published in compact print form from Monday to Saturday as The Sydney Morning Herald and on Sunday as its sister newspaper, The Sun-Herald and digitally as an online site and app, seven days a week.[5] The print edition of The Sydney Morning Herald is available for purchase from many retail outlets throughout the Sydney metropolitan area, most parts of regional New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and South East Queensland.
Overview
The Sydney Morning Herald publishes a variety of supplements, including the magazines Good Weekend (included in the Saturday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald); and Sunday Life. There are a variety of lift-outs, some of them co-branded with online classified-advertising sites:
The executive editor is James Chessell and the editor is Jordan Baker. Tory Maguire is national editor, Monique Farmer is life editor, and the publisher is chief digital and publishing officer Chris Janz.
Former editors include Bevan Shields, Darren Goodsir, Judith Whelan, Sean Aylmer, Peter Fray, Meryl Constance, Amanda Wilson (the first female editor, appointed in 2011),[6] William Curnow,[7] Andrew Garran, Frederick William Ward (editor from 1884 to 1890), Charles Brunsdon Fletcher, Colin Bingham, Max Prisk, John Alexander, Paul McGeough, Alan Revell, Alan Oakley, and Lisa Davies.
- The Guide (television) on Mondays
- Good Food (food) and Domain (real estate) on Tuesdays
- Money (personal finance) on Wednesdays
History
The Sydney Herald was founded in 1831 by three employees of the now-defunct Sydney Gazette: Ward Stephens, Frederick Stokes, and William McGarvie. A Centenary Supplement (since digitised) was published in 1931.[8] The original four-page weekly had a print run of 750. The newspaper began to publish daily in 1840, and the operation was purchased in 1841 by an Englishman named John Fairfax who renamed it The Sydney Morning Herald the following year.[9] 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".
Donald Murray, who invented a predecessor of the teleprinter, worked at the Herald during the 1890s.[10] A weekly "Page for Women" was added in 1905, edited by Theodosia Ada Wallace.[11]
The SMH was late to the trend of printing news rather than just advertising on the front page, doing so from 15 April 1944.
Editorial stance
The contemporary editorial stance of The Sydney Morning Herald is generally centrist.[28] It has been described as the most centrist of Australia's three major news publications (the others being The Australian and The Age).[28] In 2004, the newspaper's editorial page stated: "market libertarianism and social liberalism" were the two "broad themes" that guided the Herald's editorial stance.[29] During the 1999 referendum on whether Australia should become a republic, the Herald (like the other two major papers) strongly supported a Yes vote.[30] It also endorsed the Yes vote for the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum.[31]
Notable contributors
Writers
- Waleed Aly
- Eliza Ashton
- Louisa Atkinson
- Julia Baird
- Lucian Boz
- Mike Carlton
- Anne Davies
- Peter FitzSimons
- Ross Gittins
- Richard Glover
- Peter Hartcher
- Amanda Hooton
- Adele Horin
- H. G. Kippax
List of journalists
Current journalists
This is a list of The Sydney Morning Herald's current journalists.
Former journalists
The below is a list of The Sydney Morning Herald 's former journalists.
After 40 years as art critic, John McDonald was sacked in September 2024.[54]
Ownership
Fairfax went public in 1957 and grew to acquire interests in magazines, radio, and television. The group collapsed spectacularly on 11 December 1990 when Warwick Fairfax, who was the great-great-grandson of John Fairfax, attempted to privatise the group by borrowing $1.8 billion. The group was bought by Conrad Black before being re-listed in 1992. In 2006, Fairfax announced a merger with Rural Press, which brought in a Fairfax family member, John B. Fairfax, as a significant player in the company.[56] From 10 December 2018, Fairfax Media merged into Nine Entertainment, making the paper a sister to the Nine Network's TCN station.[57] This reunited the paper with a television station; Fairfax had been the founding owner of ATN, which became the flagship of what became the Seven Network.
Content
Column 8
Column 8 is a short column to which Herald readers send their observations of interesting happenings. It was first published on 11 January 1947.[58] The name comes from the fact that it originally occupied the final (8th) column of the broadsheet newspaper's front page. In a front-page redesign in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, Column 8 moved to the back page of the first section from 31 July 2000.[59] As at February 2024, the column is the final column on the Opinion (editorial and letters) pages.
The content tends to the quirky, typically involving strange urban occurrences, instances of confusing signs (often in Engrish), word play, and discussion of more or less esoteric topics.[60]
The column is also sometimes affectionately known as Granny's Column, after a fictional grandmother who supposedly edited it.[58]
Digitisation
The paper has been partially digitised as part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program project of the National Library of Australia.[72][73][74]
Awards
In March 2024, David Swan, technology editor of SMH and The Age, won the 2023 Gold Lizzie for Best Journalist of the Year at the IT Journalism Awards. He also won Best Technology Journalist and Best Telecommunications Journalist, and was highly commended in the Best Technology Issues category.[53][75] With The Age, SMH also won Best Consumer Technology Coverage and were highly commended in the Best News Coverage category.[76]
See also
- List of oldest companies in Australia
- Journalism in Australia
- List of newspapers in Australia
- The Sydney Mail – weekly magazine of The Sydney Morning Herald, published from 1860 to 1938
Further reading
- Merrill, John C. and Harold A. Fisher. The world's great dailies: profiles of fifty newspapers (1980) pp 314–19
- Gavin Souter (1981) Company of Heralds: a century and a half of Australian publishing by John Fairfax Limited and its predecessors, 1831–1981 Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, ISBN 0522842186
- Gavin Souter (1992) Heralds and angels: the house of Fairfax 1841–1992 Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, ISBN 0140173307
External links
References
- Paul Wallbank. Newspapers continue slump in latest audited circulation figures Mumbrella, 20 February 2019^
- The Sydney Morning Herald is the country's largest masthead Sydney Morning Herald, 21 November 2022, retrieved 3 January 2023^
- Margaret Simons, Bradley Buller. Journals of Record – Measure of Quality, or Dead Concept?