This paper aims to explain what business models were outlined at the beginning of European and Spanish journalism (XVI-XVII centuries). We gather in it the research results of our previous works on local scenarios and particular cases to try, from them, to design a common framework of interpretation on the structure of property and production of print media in the Modern Age. The article is structured in two parts: in the first one, we make a typology of the jobs and functions related to the collection, production and dissemination of news, and its relationship with the civil and ecclesiastical power. In the second we refer to a case that we can highlight as paradigmatic, because it gives an idea of the remarkable complexity of journalism as an object of trade already in its first centuries of existence: the case of Seville journalism.