In this book, scholar and journalist David A. Copeland provides a comprehensive discussion of the character and content of the news that ran in British American newspapers from their beginning in 1690 to the end of the colonial era.

Copeland reveals that the first generation of American papers focused on more than European news and governmental decrees and actions; they provided a variety of news topics designed to meet the informational needs of society, including news of the sea, Native Americans, religion, slaves, and crime.

In addition, news provided citizens with a certain amount of diversion and amusement through sensationalism, literature, poetry, and sports and kept colonial citizens apprised of weather, obituaries, accidents, agriculture, and social news.

To discover the news content of colonial newspapers, Copeland uses seventy-nine different English-language newspapers printed during the colonial period. Approximately seventy-four hundred newspaper issues were read in their entirety to provide a body of information previously unavailable to those studying media and colonial American history.

Colonial American Newspapers fills an important gap in the study of the content of colonial prints and concludes that as newspapers evolved to meet the informational needs of society, they helped unify the colonies by focusing upon events of local and intercolonial importance.

Colonial newspapers' claim that they printed "the freshest Advices Foreign and Domestic" developed into a thirst for news in America, something that New-York Gazette printer James Parker realized that the people "can't be without."