Civil disturbances are a special kind of news, with possibly profound consequences. In looking at news distributed during the period of the so-called crisis of the seventeenth century, especially from 1640 to 60, this paper asks: what informational supports were available to seventeenth-century rebels? And how was the reality of a rebellion conveyed to those at home and abroad, within different political, cultural and linguistic environments? What was the impact of such news at home and abroad? To answer these and various related questions, texts regarding several specific episodes of civil disturbance are chosen from among events associated with the English Civil War and the Revolution of Naples. Sources include the newly invented printed newspapers. A particular novelty of the paper is the inclusion of handwritten newsletters, the immediate ancestors to the newspapers and recently the object of the EURONEWS Project (based in Florence, Italy, and Cork, Ireland). The paper concludes that, within a modern world system soon to become global, possible avenues are eventually forged within the interstices of the media ecology, making possible real knowledge transfer as well as emancipation from ignorance if only the means and methods might occasionally be seconded by desire for change.