As the new medium of the 17th century, the newspaper helped shape the core structural conditions for modernity: an accelerated pace of circulation, new information pathways, networking, and the reproduction of knowledge. These changes confronted the academic world with a major conceptual challenge: How should one describe the complexity associated with the newspaper as a new medium? The study traces the history of discourse about “Fama's Medium” (Fama was the Roman Goddess of rumor) between the 17th and the 19th centuries, and shows how that discourse might be linked to modern media theory, such as that of Marshall McLuhan.