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Daily compact newspaper in Australia

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) is a daily tabloid newspaper published in Sydney, Australia, and owned by Nine. 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 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.

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. 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 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." 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.

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 (the others being The Australian and The Age). During the 1999 referendum on whether Australia should become a republic, the Herald (like the other two major papers) strongly supported a "yes" vote. 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., 2019 (Shorten), and 2022 (Albanese). During the 2004 Australian federal election, the Herald did not endorse a party, and 2016 federal elections, the newspaper endorsed Bill Shorten's Labor Party in 2019, after Malcolm Turnbull was ousted as prime minister. 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 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 its early days as The Sydney Herald, the newspaper's editorial stance at times reflected racist attitudes of the colony, with the paper urging squatters across Australia to emulate the mass killing of Native Americans. The front page of the paper on December 26, 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!"

Simon Letch, named as one of the year's best illustrators on four consecutive occasions.

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. From 10 December 2018, Fairfax Media merged into Nine Entertainment, making the paper a sister to the Nine Network's TCN station. 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.

Column 8 is a short column to which Herald readers send their observations of interesting happenings. It was first published on 11 January 1947. 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. 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. The column is also sometimes affectionately known as Granny's Column, after a fictional grandmother who supposedly edited it. It was edited for 15 years by George Richards, who retired on 31 January 2004. Other editors besides Deamer and Richards have been Duncan Thompson, Bill Fitter, Col Allison, Jim Cunningham, Pat Sheil, and briefly, Peter Bowers and Lenore Nicklin.

The Opinion section is a regular of the daily newspaper, containing opinion on a wide range of issues. Mostly concerned with relevant political, legal and cultural issues, the section presents work by regular columnists, including Herald political editor Peter Hartcher, Ross Gittins, as well as occasional reader submitted content. Iconoclastic Sydney barrister Charles C. Waterstreet, upon whose life the television workplace comedy Rake is loosely based, had a regular humour column in this section.

Good Weekend was launched in May 1978, as a Saturday magazine appearing in both SMH and The Canberra Times. The editor was Valerie Lawson, and Cyprian Fernandes was founding chief sub editor. It is now distributed with both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Saturday editions. It contains, on average, four feature articles written by its stable of writers and others syndicated from overseas as well as sections on food, wine, and fashion. Writers include Stephanie Wood, Jane Cadzow, Melissa Fyfe, Tim Elliott, Konrad Marshall, and Amanda Hooton. Other sections include "Modern Guru", which features humorous columnists including Danny Katz responding to the everyday dilemmas of readers; a Samurai Sudoku; and "The Two of Us", containing interviews with a pair of close friends, relatives or colleagues. Good Weekend is edited by Katrina Strickland. Previous editors include Ben Naparstek, Judith Whelan and Fenella Souter.

The paper has been partially digitised as part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program project of the National Library of Australia.