“Periodization” refers to a historical process that contains events and their trajectories. However, in the study of newspaper history, “periods” have been employed as a priori frameworks to qualitatively define events: The existence of a “period” inevitably dictates the nature and role of newspapers in it. Newspapers function passively according to the demands of their “period”, losing their own “time” and their role to shape historical “periods”. This paper argues that newspaper history researchers often fall into a fundamental misunderstanding when dividing or re-defining “periods”. Instead of attending to actual practices and fluctuations of particular newspapers, they treat periodization as mechanical intellectual exercises on a pre-drawn map of newspaper history, with neither problematics nor theoretical perspectives. Relying solely on pre-conceived logic for deduction, the “time” of newspaper history loses its inherent generative power. To conclude, the paper suggests that researchers set out from the “event-based time of newspapers”, allowing the “time of periodization” to intertwine and connect with the “time of newspapers”—i.e., their concrete actions in specific “now time”—thereby creating new periodization and methodologies for newspaper history studies.