In another ad, a Mr John Stirling announced he had received "by the Medusa, direct from London", English merchandise including prime york hams and Champion's vinegar in half hogheads. A "Ladies School" was looking for a governess, and a man in East Maitland was seeking his lost red cow, in calf, one pound reward offered.

Sideburned and bonneted, colonists perusing the newspaper on that winter's day in 1842 would have spotted some changes in their daily news sheet. It had a new name for a start: what had been The Sydney Herald only two days earlier was now The Sydney Morning Herald. It was "enlarged" too: an extra column had taken the paper to an arm-stretching eight columns - broadsheet size.

But a small name change and the addition of an extra column in that first broadsheet edition of The Sydney Morning Herald were minor compared with the changes the paper has undergone in the 171 years since.

The history of newspapers, and of the Herald, is a story of transformation. Today is a milestone in that history - the last edition of the Herald as an arm-stretching broadsheet.

Next Saturday's Herald will be a compact newspaper - bringing it into line with the compact Monday-to-Friday edition. "While the format will change, the content will not - the Herald journalism will not change," says Darren Goodsir, editor-in-chief of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald. "We'll still be giving our readers the best and widest variety of stories, the most independently researched and presented stories, without fear or favour."

Goodsir's words echo those used in that first broadsheet edition of the Herald in 1842 - what an editorial ancestor described as "our enlarged sheet". He talked of the need for "our closest observation as critics, and our most vigorous exertions as reporters", and of "maintaining the high character which the Herald has for the last few years been so fortunate as to acquire".

That high character will remain through the Herald's latest transformation, a new chapter in its robust biography.

As the decades have unfolded, the world has changed and readers' needs have become more complex, the paper has evolved to keep pace - from ads to news on the front, from black and white to colour, from printed page to digital interface.

On that day in 1842 when The Sydney Morning Herald became "equal in size to the London morning journals", ads and public notices were still on the front page. In the information-starved colony of New South Wales, notices about food supplies and commerce were clearly of greater interest than the workings of colonial government. The news of the day was relegated to page 2, and first up, first column, was the Shipping Intelligence, arguably more useful than news about "Lord Stanley's Speech" in the House of Commons or the "New Land Bill".

It would not be until January 1, 1903, that page 1 of The Sydney Morning Herald would carry the dashing innovation of news - in the form of a skinny left-hand column headed "Summary". That first page one news column would be headed by the suitably grandiloquent item: "The procession at Lord Curzon's state entry to the Delhi Durbar camp is pronounced to be the most majestic and brilliant spectacle ever seen in the East."

Another 40 years would pass and the world would be in turmoil before the Herald finally filled the front page with news. "Gigantic Air Offensive Against Europe: Unceasing for 150 Hours" announced a newly bold and prominent top-left-corner page one headline. It was April 15, 1944.

The Herald has documented, and will continue to document, the country's most traumatic news, from bubonic plague in the first decade of the 20th century, to war in Europe and the bombing of Darwin, from Cyclone Tracy to deadly bushfires.

Nothing in those early pages could have foreshadowed the transformed world in which a transformed newspaper covered stories about women's rights and racism, drug traffickers, sex discrimination and celebrity, twerking and trolling. But there were signs there might be such a thing as lifestyle journalism and sections such as Good Food, which would change the newspaper in the 1970s and 1980s.

The world may have changed. The Herald may have changed. But our interest in the human and the personal will never falter. Nor will our need for accurate and independent journalism.