were people only limited in newspapers and candidate's speeches when he was in town?

Essentially, yes. It depends a bit on what you're counting as "early US history," but one of the interesting things about the early Republic is how central newspapers were to nascent party organizations. The go-to book I'd recommend on this is Jeffrey Pasley's The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic.

Pasley's book starts with Thomas Jefferson enlisting Philip Freneau to publish the National Gazette in Philadelphia, specifically as a Democratic-Republican newspaper. (Party names were weird in the early Republic, just roll with it.) The National Gazette was specifically meant to be a counter to John Fenno's Gazette of the United States, a Federalist publication.

Anyhow, in the years after Freneau and Fenno, partisans would often organize them around newspapers, and printing presses were some of the first things to arrive in new towns. The way that the system generally worked was that each party might find an enterprising local person to serve as editor of the paper, and a skilled printer to actually produce the paper (printers themselves, being ink-stained wretches who often had deformities related to the physical difficulties of printing, were not often party leaders). The editor/printer would print political news, party platforms, and write screeds against his opposing editor, and they would often be rewarded (if the party was in power) with patronage, in the form of postmasterships and printing contracts. Newspapers also printed party ballots, which was crucial in an era before standardized ballots provided by the government.

The newspaper office in many frontier towns also was the post office, meaning that it was where men would gather to discuss the news of the day (Richard John's Spreading the News is a good look at the early postal system).

Anyhow, yes, newspapers were not only where people got their political news, but newspapers were organizing factors in the early political system.