[1][2] Makor Rishon was founded as a weekly magazine in July 1997 in order to create an independent newspaper with a Jewish religious and nationalistic slant.

The newsroom was established in the "Pirsum Yisrael" offices located in Givat Shaul in Jerusalem and included religious and secular journalists and editors.

The majority of the newspaper's editors in its early years were secular and included Meir Uziel, Michael Ruzulio, Yehuda Levi (journalist) and Ofer Shapira.

After the buyout, changes were made that included a significant increase in the number of pages and journalists as well as a move to a broadsheet newspaper format.

[4] The newspaper dealt with the crises by drastically cutting content, raising prices, firing workers, and closing down its website and article archives, among other actions.

On March 9, 2014, Ben-Tzvi's request for a two-month injunction to halt bankruptcy proceedings against the Makor Rishon and Ma’ariv newspapers was approved by the court.

In its current format, the paper includes eight sections: From January 1, 2005, until February 2006, the weekly "Hashavuon", a culture supplement that also contained a calendar for scheduled broadcasts and plays.

For a while, the newspaper published Shabbat Hagadol – an expanded Jewish philosophy supplement that appeared three times a year and was edited by Yoav Shurek.

The paper also published Makori – a Shabbat pamphlet that was distributed free of charge in synagogues and contained condensed articles from the Makor Rishon newspaper and from other sections, but was canceled towards the end of 2010.

The supplement is highly regarded and is considered a respectable platform where authors, poets, translators, researchers and Torah scholars can publish regularly.

The sections in the supplement are: a regular column on the weekly Torah portion whose author changes from Chumash to Chumash; "Arachim from a Jewish Lexicon" by Professor Shalom Rosenberg; a poetry review by Yonatan Berg, a music review by Amichai Chasson; Chayuta Deutsch's column "Lipnai U’lifnim"; "B’safa Acheret" – a monthly overview of periodicals from around the world by Zeev Shpeidel; "Yashan Mipnei Chadash", a book column by Admiel Kosman; and a section dealing with rabbinic leaders in Jewish communities around the world written by Rabbi Eliyahu Birenbaum.

NRG360 (previously "nrg") was one of the major Israeli news sites, which was owned by the Israel Hayom group and operated in cooperation with Makor Rishon.