News and information needs to travel across human space, but the distances are rather large. While messages can be directly beamed with a laser from planet to planet in a single system, interstellar communication... can't use that efficiently. It can be done, but needs both powerful equipment and precise measurement. And with the way FTL works, you can't send messages directly that way either. So, communication regressed somewhat to how it was in
pre-telegram days. As in, ships take data, like messages, news, new technology, entertainment, and go from system to system, giving it to the inhabitants, often for compensation.
Ship Specifics
Most news-merchant ships fall under the larger category of
Cyclers. Interstellar trade ships tend to transport information as well, but the distinction of a news-merchant vessel is that it deals nearly exclusively in information. They are generally equipped with data storage systems instead of cargo bays, which allows them to transport massive amounts of data and information; even smaller, five, six kilometer ships can transport millions of terabytes worth of information. This is usually necessary, as most large news-merchants carry data from tens of thousands of star systems' societies, often produced over several years or decades. Ones going from the
Core Worlds and other such major clusters often carry even more. They are also equipped with better equipment for data transfer, and often also have complex AI systems to manage them.
Communicated Information
The information news-merchants carry varies, but is still, well, information and data. The most common type is the namesake; news. What's happened in region A x years ago, how did it affect nation B and C, and the like. News, you know. The news is mostly major events and topics, but the ships often carry a small amount of trivial stuff.
The rest of the information carried varies, but is often separated into two major categories and many minor ones. Technology and entertainment. These are fairly obvious, technology is new technology, scientific discoveries, blueprints new stuff, and so on. Entertainment is mostly stuff like digital books (physical ones are carried by cargo tradeships), tv shows, movies, video games, and other such products.
News-merchants often also carry personal messages to specific locations. For inter-cluster messaging, for example, a large-distance ship takes the message along with likely millions of others, to a cluster's core, where it is sorted into the post system. From there, it is uploaded onto some other ship, which takes it to the system, delivers it into a given postal system, which delivers it to the recipient. It works the same for physical packages, but this is faster. Can still take years from cluster to cluster.
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