This book argues that news, as a transatlantic commodity, was just as valuable as sugar, tobacco, or cotton. It does so by focusing on news reports and storylines from the Atlantic world in printed newspapers, and the ways in which metropolitan and colonial authorities subsequently managed public communications. The book investigates how newspapers – ‘new media’ at the time – covered distant but urgent transoceanic conflicts with a weekly periodicity, using primary sources from Atlantic societies like Spain, Portugal, France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles, from so-called second-row Atlantic states such as Italy and the Holy Roman Empire that do not currently feature in the field’s predominant discourse of empire, and from emerging colonial societies in North and South America. It reveals the idiosyncratic rhythm of communications in the Atlantic world, which challenged news writers to navigate judiciously between speculation and confirmation, and demonstrates that the circulation of information was underlying all other transatlantic exchanges – of people, commodities, values, and ideas – that have been the staple of Atlantic history.