https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4k28la/was_there_some_kind_of_newspaper_in_ancient_rome/

Here's a post from 5 years ago that answers your question.

Original answer by: /u/XenophonTheAthenian

Actually, the Roman Forum had something way more interesting than a guy reading the news. This was the Acta Diurna. It was originally carved on stone or metal possibly from 130 BCE. By the 1st Century CE it was handwritten on papyrus. It continued publication until about 330 CE when Constantine moved the capital to the East.

The Acta, under the authority of the government, was displayed in the Roman Forum, markets and public baths. After being displayed for several days, they were collected and stored in state archives and public libraries. Those living outside Rome including the provinces would send scribes to copy the Acta on wax tablets to be sent home.

The Acta contained information from a variety of official sources.

• number of births registered at the Temple of Venus

• number of deaths registered in the Libitina on Esquiline Hill

• announcements from the state archives, tabulae publicae, about the amount of money paid into the treasury of the provinces and news related to the price of corn

• extracts from the Acta Forensia: edicts of magistrates, testaments of important men, reports of trials including the names of those acquitted or condemned, list of newly elected magistrates.

• Decrees and acclamations of the emperor

• births, deaths, festivals and movements related to the imperial family

• account of public affairs and foreign wars announced by the government

• other announcements: miracles, new buildings, fires, funerals, sacrifices, games, tales of adventures and love entanglements including the names of participants.

• Julius Caesar started public publication of extracts from Acta Senatus. Augustus reversed this decision. Tiberius appointed a young Senator to create the Acta Senatus.

Edit: Price of corn should be price of grain

An older answer of mine has been posted already, and there's another comment on here that refers to the acta (though it skips over the bit where the acta were posted on boards). But part of what you're asking about is specifically whether the praecones read out the resolutions of the senate.

No, they didn't. Or at least, there's no evidence that they ever did so. It probably wouldn't have been needed, and it certainly wouldn't have made a lot of sense to have praecones read out the actual text of senatus consulta, the decrees of the senate. When the senate passed a decree it was usually written out into a formal text using precise legal conventions, e.g. the text of the SC de Cn Pisone Patre, which uses "quod" ("whereas") to introduce the reason for the senate meeting at which the decree was passed and then C(ensuerunt) ("they, i.e. the senate, decreed that...") followed by indirect statements and the use of quod to separate out clauses. The precise conventions of an SC's text aren't that important for our purposes, except in so far as that they were distinct from the conventions of the text of a lex, a law passed by the people at the assembly, and in both speech and text were noticeably different enough that no Roman would confuse the two. The texts of SCs were, like the texts of the leges, deposited in the treasury as an official record but also inscribed on bronze tablets (beeeeeg heavy bronze tablets--the smallest that I know of is still the size of a couple of middle schoolers standing next to each other, and SCs in particular tended to have multiple tablets) and posted on the Capitoline. We don't know precisely how this worked or how exactly they were displayed (were they actually easily read, or were they perhaps way too high up?), but we do know that the exterior walls of the temple of Jupiter would've been absolutely covered by bronze tablets containing the texts of laws, decrees of the senate, possibly rogationes (bills), and the records of the activities of significant magistrates.

It's possible that the text of a decree of the senate would have been posted on whitened boards in the forum before or alongside the bronze copy on the Capitoline. We do know that SCs were very frequently copied out and distributed widely, and some decrees like the SC de bacchanalibus of 186, which is specifically about affairs in Italy, have clauses that require the towns of Italy to post bronze copies of the decree in public places (many of these texts were found outside of Rome). In addition, as a sort of legitimization of their status, the Greek cities of the east almost obsessively inscribed these decrees, Roman laws, and letters to their cities from Roman officials (which, like imperial rescripts, had an essentially legal quality in the provinces) on stone rather than bronze, typically in translation or as bilingual inscriptions. Decrees of the senate, specifically, we know were sometimes inscribed in part or in full at locations pertinent to their content. For example, there's the SC de pago Montano, which survives in part on a very unimpressive inscription currently in the basement of the Capitoline Museum. The text, rather poorly and probably hastily inscribed, records part of a decree of the senate prohibiting the dumping of trash and dead bodies within the boundaries of the pagus Montanus, an administrative district probably just outside the Esquiline Gate. The text is broken at the top, so it's unclear whether the entire decree or only the relevant portion was inscribed, but the stone is clearly a boundary stone. In other words, this inscription (a tertiary copy at best of a text already deposited in the treasury and inscribed on bronze on the Capitoline) recorded a decree involving the boundary stones of an administrative region on the boundary stones themselves, basically as a kind of warning sign--only that instead of writing "No Dumping," they copied out the text of the decree. There are other examples of these sort of "warning sign" copies, but this is to my knowledge the earliest.

So copies of the texts of decrees were publicly available, and were disseminated through various means and at various locations. But were they read, and by whom? Like I said, there's no evidence to my knowledge that a praeco would have read the texts of senatorial decrees at Rome, and they certainly wouldn't have done so as depicted in HBO's TV show, which would have to be a greatly abbreviated and stylized version of the actual text, seeing as that the praeco's announcements have none of the stylistic conventions necessary in SCs. However, we know that at least in Italy they were sometimes read aloud. The SC de bacchanalibus mentions that the Italian towns are, in addition to posting bronze copies in public places, supposed to hold a contio where a praeco will read the text. It's not necessarily unreasonable to assume that something similar might have happened within the city itself, and a broadly parallel procedure is known for the leges. When a rogatio, or bill, was proposed its text was posted on whitened boards for at least three weeks before voting day, and magistrates could hold contiones for and against the bill. At at least some of these contiones the text seems to have been recited aloud by a praeco before the speakers spoke, and a final contio was always held immediately before the vote at the voting assembly itself, which culminated in the praeco's recitation of the text of the rogatio and the promulgating magistrate's command to the assembly to disperse into its voting units. This recitation of the text was significant, because it came last rather than first, as we might expect it--the tribune Octavius was the first to veto the praeco's reading of the bill in 133 against Ti. Gracchus, and following him this became the standard procedure for vetoing a bill.

However, the iter legis, or path of a law, was distinct from the procedure by which a decree of the senate was passed and published. Unlike the texts of rogationes, which were drafted in advance by the promulgating magistrate and his scribes (i.e. clerks), the texts of senatorial decrees were usually written after the resolutions were passed, except in rare cases in which someone proposed a fully-fledged motion in the senate already drawn up and drafted. This means that there must have been a not inconsiderable delay between when the motion was passed and when the text was available, and although the text would've been pretty predictable a praeco can't read something that doesn't exist. While it's possible that on subsequent days praecones might have recited the text of the decree (though HBO incorrectly has praecones just announcing this stuff to nobody all day long--in fact, the praeco only read such documents at contiones, which presents the problem I already mentioned of whether such contiones were only done in municipalities or whether they also occurred in Rome), the Roman public's first encounter with a senatus consultum would not have been through the praeco.

Rather, when a decree of the senate was passed, the consul was supposed to call a contio at the rostra just across from the senate house, and explain there the content of the decree. This is what Cicero's third oration against Catiline is, the contio in which Cicero informed the people of the state of emergency that had been declared earlier in the senate. Cicero doesn't quote the decree, nor does he describe it in the amusingly anchorman-like terms the HBO praeco uses, but rather he explains the decree and its significance, and he advises the Roman people what they ought to do next. It's not a long speech, and presumably most senatorial decrees didn't merit a speech of even this length and complexity, since most senatorial decrees weren't declaring states of emergency. As far as we can tell this post-decree contio of the consul was probably the most significant communication of a senatorial decree to the inhabitants of Rome. While we have a fair amount of evidence for people interacting with (or talking about interaction with) the bronze copies of the laws, the texts of senatus consulta were often obscure and don't seem to have been consulted very often. In the text of the SC on the Oropians and the tax-farmers it's mentioned that a special committee (including a relatively young Cicero) was formed in the senate to consult a decree of the senate and the records of statements of Sulla that resolved the dispute between the Oropians and the tax-farmers. Apparently the text of the decree was not known precisely and wasn't immediately on hand, so the committee was necessary to find it and figure out what exactly it said--no great surprise given that it was almost a decade old, very limited in scope and relevance, and decrees of the senate were passed constantly.