Before there were blogs

The Folger Shakespeare Library ran a vibrant exhibition, "Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper," curated by Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey with Elizabeth Walsh, September 25, 2008-January 31, 2009. The exhibition is still online and is a sort of catalog book of the early newspaper from 1620s to early 18th century.

Our Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714 includes selections from MS. newsletters - 4.2 A Spanish newsletter about Hawkins and Drake (December 1569) and 8.8 Selections from newsletters (1675–82), as well as selections from early modern newspapers - 8.9 Selections from Whig and Tory newspapers (1679–82). Selections from the many newsbooks of the 1640s, however, must be searched for elsewhere. Early English Books Online (EEBO) has those collected and bound by George Thomason, and a modern edition of selections is to be found in Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641-1649 (Oxford University Press, 2005).