The hand-written newsletters – known in Europe by various names: avvisi, reporti, gazzette, ragguagli, nouvelles, advis, corantos, courantes, zeitungen, etc. – were the fastest and most efficient means by which military and political news could be circulated between 1500 and 1700. From the middle of the sixteenth century, the newsletter writers, variously called menanti, reportisti or, more generally, gazzettieri (gazetteers), depending on where they came from, set up regular news services, a regularity dictated by the postal service network which by then had spread to embrace the whole continent. These services could be used in different ways, at different (pre-set) costs, which varied in relation to the type and quality of service required.

In this period, these hand-written newsletters often served as the basis upon which European ambassadors would draw up and write the dispatches they sent back to their respective courts, each ambassador interpreting and dealing with the avviso according to specific diplomatic traditions: some would enclose them along with an account of the current political situation of the country, others would rewrite them or work them directly into the dispatch.

It did not take long for the newsletters to filter out from the chancelleries and spread throughout society. Indeed, they influenced the first stirrings of public opinion that began to appear during the course of the seventeenth century, if one can indeed use the term ‘public opinion’ in relation to this historical period.