This paper looks at the Dehli Urdu Akhbar (henceforward DUA), the first full-fledged newspaper in Urdu, which started publication in 1837, and tries to locate it at the confluence of the traditional Mughal institutions and the newly introduced British models. While the colonial administrators continued to use the traditional methods of gathering information on the different royal and princely courts through the daily reports of accredited news-writers until almost 1857, they were nevertheless convinced that the vernacular newspapers, which started to appear from the second decade of the nineteenth century, owed themselves entirely to the British initiative, model and patronage: