The Sydney Morning Herald


The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily tabloid newspaper published in Sydney, Australia, and owned by Nine Entertainment. 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. It is considered a newspaper of record for Australia.
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. 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 ; and Sunday Life. There are a variety of lift-outs, some of them co-branded with online classified-advertising sites:
  • The Guide on Mondays
  • Good Food and Domain on Tuesdays
  • Money on Wednesdays
  • Drive, Shortlist on Fridays
  • News Review, Spectrum, Domain, Drive and MyCareer on Saturdays
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, William Curnow, Andrew Garran, Frederick William Ward, Charles Brunsdon Fletcher, Colin Bingham, Max Prisk, John Alexander, Paul McGeough, Alan Revell, Alan Oakley, and Lisa Davies.

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 was published in 1931. 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. 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. A weekly "Page for Women" was added in 1905, edited by Theodosia Ada Wallace.
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. The newspaper launched a Sunday edition, The Sunday Herald, in 1949. 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.
John Fairfax & Sons Limited commemorated the Herald's 150th anniversary in 1981 by presenting the City of Sydney with Stephen Walker's sculpture Tank Stream Fountain.
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. After abandoning these plans later in the year, Fairfax Media again announced in June 2012 its plan to shift both broadsheet newspapers to tabloid size, with effect from 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 was 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 online 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."
On 22 February 2014, the Saturday edition was produced in broadsheet format for the final time, with this too converted to compact format on 1 March 2014, ahead of the decommissioning of the printing plant at Chullora in June 2014.
In June 2022, the paper received global coverage and backlash to an attempted outing of Australian actress Rebel Wilson by columnist Andrew Hornery, and the subsequent defence of his since-deleted column by editor Bevan Shields; Wilson pre-empted the Hornery disclosure with an Instagram post confirming her relationship.
In November 2025, Shields resigned as editor and will hand the job over to political editor Jordan Baker in the beginning of 2026.

''Daily Life'' Woman of the Year

In 2012, Woman of the Year awards were created by the editor of the Daily Life section, Sarah Oakes, inspired by the sexism faced by former prime minister Julia Gillard. Winners were selected as the result of voting by the public as well as a panel of judges appointed by Fairfax. Winners have included:
The contemporary editorial stance of The Sydney Morning Herald is generally centrist. It has been described as the most centrist of Australia's three major news publications. In 2004, the newspaper's editorial page stated: "market libertarianism and social liberalism" were the two "broad themes" that guided the Heralds editorial stance. During the 1999 referendum on whether Australia should become a republic, the Herald strongly supported a Yes vote. It also endorsed the Yes vote for the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum.
The Sydney Morning Herald did not endorse the Labor Party for federal office in the first six decades of Federation, always endorsing a conservative government. The newspaper has since endorsed Labor in seven federal elections: 1961, 1984 and 1987, 2007, 2010, 2019, 2022, and 2025.
During the 2004 Australian federal election, the Herald did not endorse a party, but subsequently resumed its practice of making endorsements. After endorsing the Coalition at the 2013 and 2016 federal elections, the newspaper endorsed Bill Shorten's Labor Party in 2019, after Malcolm Turnbull was ousted as prime minister.
At the state level, the Herald has consistently backed the Coalition; the only time since 1973 that it has endorsed a Labor government for New South Wales was Bob Carr's government in the 2003 election, though it declined to endorse either party three times during this period.
The Herald endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The Herald endorsed the Liberal-National Coalition in the run-up for the 2023 New South Wales state election.
In May 2023, the Herald opposed the extradition of former WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange to the United States, with the newspaper conducting a poll that found 79% oppose Assange's extradition to the United States.
In 2024, the Herald supported the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris during that year's presidential election in the United States.

Myall Creek coverage and apology

As The Sydney Herald, the newspaper's editorial stance at times reflected racist attitudes within the colony, with the paper urging squatters across Australia to emulate the mass killing of Native Americans. The front page of the paper on 26 December 1836 read: "If nothing but extermination will do, they will exterminate the savages as they would wild beasts." In the wake of the Myall Creek massacre in which at least twenty-eight unarmed Wirraayaraay men, women and children were murdered by a group of white stockmen, the paper published a long letter from a squatter in defence the killings. The squatter described the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia as "the most degenerate, despicable, and brutal race of beings in existence", writing: "they will, and must become extinct – civilization destroys them – where labor and industry flourish, they die!" The Herald's editorialisation on the trials contrasted with other newspapers which were more respectful on the matter and on the notion of Aboriginal Australians being protected under the law as British subjects, the same as settlers. In 2023, the paper apologised for its coverage of the massacre and the subsequent trials of the perpetrators.

Notable contributors

Writers