In Sweden, there were several ways news spread around.

Before the reformation, news often spread through meetings - at things, markets and estates parliament meetings, people would talk, exchange news and information and listen to storytellers or bards telling chronicles, often financed by great men as a tool of propaganda. The Engelbrekt chronicle and the Karl chronicle are examples of such propaganda works, aimed at telling a rosy pespective of the actions of the man who ordered the work and paint his enemies in as bad a light as possible. Noblemen would attend or send representatives, often to spread news or a narrative suitable to their interests.

For example, when Gustav Eriksson (Vasa), the future King of Sweden arrived to Mora to attempt to have the men of Dalarna rise against the Danish Kalmar Union King Kristian II, the news of the bloodbath in Stockholm did not reach Mora from several sources (enough for the men to believe them) until after the would-be revolted had attempted to raise the men in revolt.

After the reformation and the invention of the printing press, the local priests were given the task of reading news, announcements and other information to the people in their parish from the pulpit after the sermon. Printed information also became available, first as shot announcements and reports from the estates parliament sessions and later as whole books with all decrees from the king and the parliament over the year.

With the allotment (indelning) soldier system, soldiers were required to travel to train with their company, their battalion and their regiment monthly, bi-monthly and yearly and were thus often carriers of news and informaton from far away, as they met other soldiers and were read announcements and information by their officers.

The first Swedish newspaper, Ordinari Post Tijdender (ordinary/regular postal news) was started 1645 and was a state-run newspaper that included letters from correspondents both domestic and foreign. However, the weekly 4-page paper was expensive and printed in a very small pressing, mainly being intended for state officials, priests and the upper crust of society, for them to spread orally as they saw fit.

News were more or less word-by-mouth, where the rich and powerful would hire people to influence what was being said by songs and epics until the printing press and more organised states, when officials and priests were often given the task to spread (state-sanctioned) news in their districts, provinces and parishes.

Interestingly enough, in many cases "the news" as we see it wasn't really something people cared or even thought about. It wasn't until the development of commodity trade and towns/cities that news really took off. Habermas describes this very well in his landmark publication:

The traffic in news that developed alongside the traffic in commodities showed a similar pattern. With the expansion of trade, merchants' market-oriented calculations required more frequent and more exact information about distant events. From the fourteenth century on, the traditional letter carrying by merchants was for this reason organized into a kind of guildbased system of correspondence for their purposes. The merchants organized the first mail routes, the so-called ordinary mail, departing on assigned days. The great trade cities became at the same time centers for the traffic in news;!1 the organization of this traffic on a continuow basis became imperative to the degree to which the exchange of commodities and of securities became continuous. Almost simultaneously with the origin of stock markets, postal services and the press insthutionalized regular contacts and regular communication. To be sure, the merchants were satisfied with a system that limited information to insiders; the urban and court chanceries preferred one that served only the needs of administration. Neither had a stake in information that was public. What corresponded to their interests, rather, were "news letters," the private correspondences commercially organized by newsdealers.'I2

The new sector of communications, with its institutions for a traffic in news, fitted in with the existing forms of communication without difficulty as long as the decisive elementpublicness-was lacking. Just as, according to Sombart's definition, one could speak of "mail" only when the regular opportunity for letter dispatch became accessible to the general public,slI so there existed a press in the strict sense only once the regular supply of news became public, that is, again, accessible to the general public. But this occurred only at the end of the seventeenth century.1I4 Until then the traditional domain of communication in which publicity of representation held sway was not fundamentally threatened by the new domain of a public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word.

There was as yet no publication of commercially distributed news; the irregularly published reports of recent events were not comparable to the routine production of news.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Apologies for the poor copy job. He goes on to explain the development of a public sphere coinciding with the development of public governance, and the need therefore for the passing of information between the government and consituents. He further discusses the development of news in the public sphere as a growing commodity intertwined with the increasing interconnectedness of the ascendant capitalist economy.