This paper pursues the question of how news about science moved in print culture during the disruptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. During this time, information about novel ideas or discoveries was consumed by a range of individuals, from an elite cadre of scientific devotees down to broad lay public audiences. From the discovery of new celestial bodies or exotic flora and fauna to dramatic experiments in electricity, ballooning, or gas chemistry, items of scientific news of great interest to specialist investigators could often be found identically served up for the entertainment or edification of lay readers in newspapers and general periodicals. I use examples from the fast-moving, spectacular and occasionally controversial science of Galvanism to uncover the international communicative system of print that propagated scientific news. At the heart of this system were the editors of a newly-founded set of British, French and German monthly scientific journals, whose publications regularly reprinted each other’s news and articles, striving to offer the first published information on novel discoveries to their respective countries’ scientifically-inclined readers. I will focus especially on the monthly knowledge-work performed by these editors of obtaining, selecting, and reprinting scientific news text, setting it against the shifting background of the disruptions and blockades of the Napoleonic wars, which constantly tested the ingenuity of these technicians of periodical print. This focus will lead to a display of how scientific news text flowed easily between what are commonly thought of as separate ‘specialist’ and ‘popular’ forms. Material lifted from scientific journals was frequently reprinted in newspapers and magazines; and in one special case which I will detail, a French newspaper consistently provided a crucial source of information for British journals. While acknowledging the vital role that continued to be played by personal correspondence in scientific communication, I will use Galvanism to show the complex ways in which scientific journals (which as the nineteenth century advanced withdrew steadily into their own sphere of expert scientific publishing) were in this period deeply embedded within the wider world of print, subsisting in a symbiotic relationship with other kinds of publications in the burgeoning news culture of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years.