The chapter examines and compares grammatical, syntactic and lexical features in the English and French periodical press of the early seventeenth century. Adopting methodologies from corpus-based translation studies and historical linguistics, the study explores whether and how the presence of translation in the production of English-language news affected the linguistic makeup of English news publications in the first decades of English periodical news. Through quantitative and qualitative comparisons of sentence length and lexical diversity in both an English and French corpus of seventeenth-century news, the chapter demonstrates that translation appears to impact newswriting through two distinct mechanisms, namely the universal of simplification and the universal of interference. The results of the research not only confirm the existence of two distinct types of news writing in England between 1620 and 1650, they also crucially show that the distinct types vary according to their proximity to the continental model of newswriting. The two electronic corpora investigated comprise English corantos and newsbooks in the Florence Early English Newspapers corpus (1620–1649) and a separate corpus consisting of editions of the Gazette de France (1632) compiled by Mairi McLaughlin.