Most newspapers in the English-speaking world have names that are basically just approximate synonyms for "newspaper": Journal or Gazette or Record or Press or Ledger or Chronicle or Bulletin or News or Register and the list goes on. "Hey, Ed! What's another word for 'newspaper?'" And there you go. These names are all just blisteringly obvious, so it should come as no surprise to find them repeated all over the place.

Others have names that are a little bit — usually barely — more metaphorical or metonymic: Beacon or Signal or Sentinel or Tribune or Herald or Courier or Dispatch or Telegraph or Post. These are only slightly less obvious than the literal "I'm calling my newspaper 'Newspaper'" names we just talked about.

But then there are the really fun ones, the ones that fit no particular mold: The Sacramento Bee. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Cleveland's Plain Dealer. The Sussex Countian of Delaware's Sussex county, which is just delightful.

Anyway, long story short, newspapers tend to have obvious names because those names tend to be obvious.

Hi there, I actually studied newspapers in my home state for my master's thesis (I was looking at perceptions of objectivity and professionalism in the highly partisan atmosphere of Reconstruction in a border state).

/u/MaturinTheTurtle has it right that many newspaper names are basically some version of "news" in fancy language. But something that's also worth pointing out is that the overwhelming majority of newspapers in the U.S. from about say 1810 through 1900 or so were partisan (and that partisan tradition carried on in many smaller towns for several decades). So, it wasn't at all uncommon to see the local paper called the Democrat or Republican or Federalist or Anti-Federalist or, in the period I studied in school, the Granger or Farmer's Advocate or even Communist. Newspapers that didn't necessarily have a strong partisan bent might just be called something like Advertiser or Intelligencer or the like. You also get fun mergers where the new publication encompasses both older names, so you get the Democrat-Republican and the like.

There were also a large number of foreign-language newspapers published in the U.S., and in the state I studied they were overwhelmingly German. Zeitung was a popular name; it just means "newspaper," but it could be used with a modifier: Volkszeitung for example, for "The People's Newspaper."

You also see some "odd" newspaper names such as the Tribune, named after the Roman tribunes who protected certain classes of citizens. Sun, Star, Beacon and the like are also connected with the idea that newspapers provide enlightenment. Frederick Douglass's paper was called the North Star for obvious symbolic reasons, and the newspaper in Wilmington, N.C. was called the Morning Star for 100+ years. (It later merged with the Sunday News and was called the Star-News, and now StarNews. Marketers ruin everything.) The newspaper in Boulder, Colorado, is called the Daily Camera, because it started being published around the time that photography was able to be published in newspapers, and it made its early living publishing scenes of the Rockies.

I'll close with two of my favorite newspaper names, from cities near me: Centralia, Mo. still supports the Fireside Guard, and Linn, Mo.'s newspaper dates back to the Reconstruction era: the Unterrified Democrat.

A good source on the partisan press era is Jeffrey L. Pasley's The Tyranny of Printers.