Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c.

Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. was the first Dutch newspaper. It was published in June 1618 in Amsterdam. It was a regular weekly publication. It can be called the first broadsheet paper, because it was issued in folio-size. Before this, news periodicals had been pamphlets in quarto-size.

The paper carries no imprint of the printer or the publisher. Similar papers published later suggest that it may have been printed by Joris Veseler and published and edited by Caspar van Hilten. The exact date of the publication is not known, but the dates of the news items suggest that it was probably printed between 14 and 18 June 1618.

The Courante was a single folio sheet. This means it was a full sheet folded once to form 4 pages and then cut open at the fold. The first issues were printed on just one side of the sheet. It also does not have a serial number, a date or a publisher's imprint. These features are now considered essential to newspapers. The imprint appeared in 1619. The date and serial number as well as the practice of printing on both sides of the sheet started in 1620.

The first issue presented news from four sources, including Venice, Cologne and Prague. This corresponds with the name of the newspaper, which in English means "Current events from Italy, Germany, etc". The main text runs in two columns. The columns are separated with a gutter and a line running in it. There are no empty lines within the body text. The body of the text is printed in Dutch black-letter, except for the numbers. Roman type is used for datelines which also act as headlines for the news items. The text is fully justified and the beginnings of paragraphs are identified with indents approximately the size of the line-height.

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