Although the following articles refers specifically to newspapers in New South Wales, the same can be said to apply to other states in Australia as well as Britain and many other places throughout the world.

The first newspaper in the colony of New South Wales was the Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser. It first appeared on the 5 March 1803 and was printed by a convict George Howe. Howe continued to publish this weekly newspaper until his death in 1821. At this time his son, Robert Howe continue the newspaper. It became a bi-weekly in 1825 and a tri-weekly in 1831. It ceased publication in 1842. The Sydney Gazette has always been recognized by historians as a reliable source of information because it was originally under strict government censorship and all copy had to be officially approved. As well as including functions many of the functions we associate with a newspaper it also carried official government orders and proclamations, and it also served as a Government Gazette until 1832 when the NSW Government Gazette was inaugurated. You may be sure that any deviation from the original guidelines set out in the Prospective would have involved the printer in unfortunate consequences.

From the 1820's there were a number of newspapers published in Sydney which lasted for varying time spans, including The Australian, The Colonist, the Sydney Monitor, the Sydney Times, The Sydney Chronicle, the Australian Chronicle, the Sydney Standard and Colonial Advocate and the Sydney Herald. The most well known was the Sydney Herald which began in April 1831 and continued until 1840 when it came under the proprietorship of John Fairfax. The title was changed to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1842 and has remained so ever since. This newspaper carried news not only of Sydney but other parts of the state, interstate and overseas.

The first provincial or regional newspaper in New South Wales began in the Hunter Valley in 1841, as the Hunter Gazette but it was short lived. It was the Maitland Mercury which began in January 1843 which became the great success story. It began as a weekly and then a bi-weekly in 1846 to a tri-weekly in 1856. It was so successful that in 1893 it became a daily. It covered the news not only of the whole Hunter Valley, but it had it's own 'correspondents' reporting throughout the whole of northern and western New South Wales. Later when many of these towns began to produce their own newspapers the Maitland Mercury continued to spread the news by publishing 'extracts' from these publications. Later it was found that these 'extracts' became a very important consideration when the original issues of the 'extracted' publication had not survived.

The Provincial newspapers of NSW to follow the Maitland Mercury were:

Brisbane Courier – 1846

Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal – 1848

Goulburn Herald – 1848

Armidale Express – 1856

Newcastle Chronicle – 1858

Clarence and Richmond Examiner - 1859

The above mentioned Sydney newspapers, the Maitland Mercury, Brisbane Courier, and the Bathurst Free Press may be found in digital form on the National Library website. Recently the Clarence and Richmond Examiner has been added to the list. When using the digital forms of the newspapers, two things must be remembered. Firstly, not all surviving issues of the newspaper may be scanned and available on-line, and secondly that the on-line search facility relies on OCR (optical character recognition) computer software for the recognition of the 'search' words and phrases. This is not 100% accurate and may not return all the items sort. It may also return very high numbers of entries for the research 'words', which can be confusing and frustrating to a researcher. Here published indexes and finding aids, including my indexing programs can assist the researcher, as they can be used as a quick aid to identify people and places of interest. Then with the actual name and date of the newspaper the notice or item can be easily located in the digitized form.

Before the digitization of newspapers the information from the newspapers could only be accessed by sitting down and actually reading the newspapers. This was extremely time consuming and it was adhoc so family historians could become very disappointed about the information they could find.