The "Navajo Times" started as a newsletter in 1959. The Navajo Tribal Council began it. They wanted to be able to talk to people living on Navajo land and people living in other places, for example Navajo students away at school. It became a newspaper the following year, in 1960. At first, it was a monthly newsletter, then weekly. In the early 1960s, the paper covered infrastructure-related stories like health care, education, and economic development. As of 2020, the first few years of the paper are archived in the Arizona Memory Project.