No one has mentioned the original Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the first newspaper in British North America (the publisher had to run an article explaining how the paper would gather news). It's creation was motivated by the Puritan upheavals following England's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. It ran for only one issue in 1690 before the colonial government forbade further publication of anything without their permission. (The publisher had been involved in libeling Roman Catholics when he lived in England.)