And early newspapers in the American colonies?

There were very few of them. The first to be sustained beyond one issue was the Boston Newsletter begun in 1704. When Benjamin Franklin's older brother James considered starting a newspaper in Boston more than a decade later, friends tried to discourage him on the grounds that one newspaper was plenty for Massachusetts. James went ahead nonetheless, issuing the New England Courant and providing young Ben, hired as his apprentice, his first experience in the printer's trade.

In all of the thirteen American colonies in 1760 there were about twenty newspapers, doubling to forty by 1775, located primarily in the population centers of Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. They were four-page weekly publications generally organized like the London journals before them in two or three columns on a page. Their contents: an assortment of local advertising, some paragraphs of local gossip, and large amounts of European political and economic intelligence reprinted directly from London newspapers (and the London papers often reprinted from Dutch newspapers that translated Dutch and German and Italian accounts). When Thomas Jefferson was Secretary of State under President George Washington, he worked with editors who were willing to print articles from the Gazette de Leyte, a Dutch newspaper much more sympathetic to the French Revolution than the London papers from which most American printers routinely took their news. Jefferson understood very well that reprinting, or what today is called aggregating, was how American newspapers worked.

In any given colonial newspaper, political news of other American colonies rarely appeared. Local political news was rarely noted or discussed. Printers typically did not see their newspapers as either political instruments or professional agencies for gathering news. They just printed what came to them. They avoided controversy although, by generally printing whatever individuals might voluntarily send them for publication, they were not always able to escape it. The preponderance of foreign news, however, was overwhelming. When Ben Franklin moved to Philadelphia and started his own newspaper there, the Pennsylvania Gazette, only some 6% of news items over its several decades touched on politics in Philadelphia or in the colony of Pennsylvania.

There was little sense that the general public was an appropriate audience for political information. When the occasional pamphlet took up a political matter, it was written with the colonial assembly or legislature as audience, not the public at large. Not until the 1740s did some writers produce pamphlets that explicitly focused on the general citizenry as readers. This was particularly the case in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston as political conflict became more common in these centers of commerce and commotion.