In the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant public sphere was emerging in the Eastern Mediterranean accompanied by extensive political and economic transformations. While previous studied have often focused on this phenomenon within the context of specific countries, such as the Ottoman Empire and Greece, historical evidence challenges this perspective. The circulation of newspapers contributed to the emergence of a transnational public sphere that encompassed several countries in the Eastern Mediterranean. In this paper, I examine the interactions between the Grecophone newspapers of the Ottoman Empire and those of Greece in the 1860s and 1870s. Through close readings of news articles and editorials, I trace the significant impact of Greece’s political life on the Ottoman Greek community. The Ottoman Greek newspapers reported in great detail what was happening in Athens, where constitutional monarchy was relatively strong. Thus, Grecophone readers in the Ottoman Empire had been accustomed with ideas of constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy long before they became popular in Ottoman political discourse with the movement of the Young Ottomans. Moreover, although newspapers from Athens and Istanbul were written in the same language and aimed at the same audience, they were published in different countries. Thus, they served different nation-building projects which intended to establish Athens or Istanbul as the center of the Greek nation. Finally, my research into the cost of newspaper subscriptions reveals the elitist nature of the public sphere because an annual subscription was beyond the means of a worker in Istanbul. Thus, it can be argued that the intended audience of these newspapers was the emerging elites of merchants and financiers, who sought to translate their wealth into sociocultural influence and political power. Newspapers served as conduits for the views of these bankers, and the transnational public sphere allowed them to disseminate their views in different countries. The characteristics of this public sphere also reveal that these elites were not sure which country was better suited to satisfy their ambitions. In the 1870s, the popularity of Ottomanism among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire as well as the “repatriation” of capital and men of capital to Greece were expressions of this quest. Without newspapers, this whole process would have been unthinkable.