The Sydney Morning Herald
| The Sydney Morning Herald - SMH | |
|---|---|
|
|
| description | Subscription daily newspaper |
| publishing company | Fairfax Media |
| First edition | April 18, 1831 |
| Frequency of publication | daily (Sundays The Sun-Herald ) |
| Sold edition | 104,000 copies |
| ( February 2016 ) | |
| Range | 0.77 to 1.01 million readers |
| (March 2011) | |
| Editor-in-chief | Darren Goodsir |
| Web link | www.smh.com.au |
| Article archive | In Trove Digitized newspapers and more : 1831 to 1842 1842 to 1954 1953 to 1954 (Sunday edition) |
| ISSN |
0312-6315 |
The Sydney Morning Herald , often referred to briefly as Herald in Sydney and abbreviated to SMH, is one of Australia's leading daily newspapers . First published in 1831 as the weekly newspaper The Sydney Herald , it is the oldest existing newspaper on the continent.
The Herald is a classic broadsheet , so it appears in the classic format of quality newspapers in the English-speaking world. This corresponds roughly to the format of German subscription newspapers. Originally conservative in its orientation, it turned into a more left-liberal newspaper , especially in competition with the conservative The Australian of the News Corporation of Rupert Murdoch . With a circulation of around 212,000 in March 2006 (Saturday edition: 365,000), it is the second largest newspaper in the four million metropolis of Sydney, after the tabloid Daily Telegraph , also from Murdoch .
history
The Sydney Herald was founded in 1831 as a weekly newspaper by former employees of the Sydney Gazette , the first Australian newspaper published since 1803, and first appeared on April 18 of that year. The Herald is Australia's oldest surviving newspaper. The Sydney Herald , as it was called in the early years, started with a circulation of 750 copies. It has been published daily since 1840. In 1841 the English immigrant John Fairfax took over the newspaper, whose descendants controlled it until 1990, although it was converted into a public company in 1957.
In 1987, the then 26-year-old Warwick Fairfax, great-great-grandson of John Fairfax, tried to bring the newspaper into his sole possession with the publishing group, which now belongs to it, and over-indebted it in the process. With a debt of $ 1.7 billion, the company finally collapsed in December 1990. A recession in those years accelerated the collapse of John Fairfax Holding . The company then briefly passed into the possession of the later discredited Canadian publisher Conrad Black , but was converted back into a public limited company by 1993. In the meantime, during this phase, the once richest man in Australia, the media entrepreneur Kerry Packer, also owned shares in Fairfax. The latter attempted a complete takeover of Fairfax in the same decade, but failed with the Tourang Consortium founded for this purpose . Both Conrad Black and Kerry Packer were later forced to give up their stake in Fairfax due to restrictions placed on them by their ownership of other media.
The Herald first appeared on the Internet in 1995.
On June 18, 2012, Fairfax Media announced, as Fairfax Holdings has been operating for several years, that the Herald will appear in tabloid format from March 2013, i.e. the format corresponding to a classic tabloid . The Melbourne sister newspaper The Age is also to be converted into a tabloid during the same period . The Herald's website is to be paid at least in part. On the same day, Fairfax Media announced the closure of the group's two largest printing plants in Sydney's Chullora and Melbourne's Tullamarine in June 2013 and the layoff of 1,900 employees within the next three years. These announcements are related to the ongoing collapse of the traditional financing model for print media in the age of the Internet. Of the six weekly editions of the Herald, only the weekend edition made a profit.
