A lot of us are fond of having our narratives span a wide swath of country. The main characters specifically find themselves questing their way right across the map, or just find themselves bouncing about between locations in which they could get things done; PCs find themselves running to problems, or away from them, or chasing rumors and treasure and who knows what all else. That means that every time they reach a new population center, or even a new settlement, one question comes up—how much do the locals know about their visitors?
The first thing to take into account, of course, is how the news is spreading. There are a lot of ways that people can send messages even in a basic low-tech world, never mind something as complex as our modern society—news can spread via just one of them, or through combinations. That, in turn, determines things like how fast the news spreads, particularly relative to the characters, and how well the message is maintained, absent interference, and that determines whether it can be outrun.
Can the word be stopped once it gets going? If the news can travel, someone will probably have an interest in either preventing or ensuring that it gets where it needs to go—assuming that something doesn’t just plain go wrong. Messenger birds can be eaten by predators, communication towers destroyed, magic redirected, websites denied service, TV stations relieved of their broadcast equipment, anything with moving parts can suffer mechanical failure, cloudy weather can interfere with a heliograph—what, both of human origin or just inconvenient coincidence, might get between the message and its goal, and if the problems are of human origin, just how far is their originator willing to go?
Moreover, what sorts of things might change the message? People rarely learn about things that happen exactly as they happened, after all; at the very least, observer bias will play into how a given event is relayed. Some means of transmission suffer from their own risks of error—word of mouth is basically one large game of Telephone, for instance, and we know how that plays, while Now add the possibility of someone wanting to change the message, either before it’s sent or while it’s in transit—it would be less noticeable in many cases than stopping the message, so if it’s feasible, the damage becomes a lot harder to notice and fix.
News—tidings, rumors, messages, what have you—can be a very important element of a story, particularly when there are characters who either live by their reputations or live by running from their reputations. Knowing where the news has reached, where it hasn’t, and what sort of shape it’s in when it gets there will provide an excellent and reliable source of potential for havoc.