The First Newspaper

 

Listen, I’m going to tell you a story about something that happened a long time ago—1744, to be exact—and if you think it doesn’t matter anymore, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. Because what happened to that first newspaper in Batavia, well, that was the template for everything that came after. The monster was born then, you see, and it never really died.

The Thing That Shouldn’t Have Existed

In the early 18th century, under the iron thumb of the VOC—that’s the Dutch East India Company, but you can just call it what it really was: a corporation that owned people, owned cities, owned whole goddamned countries—there was a paradox brewing in Batavia.

The paradox was this: How do you run a massive trading empire without information flowing like blood through veins, but also without letting anyone actually think too much about what they’re reading? How do you feed the beast without waking it up?

The VOC needed information the way a junkie needs a fix. Ship schedules. Commodity prices. Auction notices. Who died, who got promoted, who got sent back to Amsterdam in disgrace. Batavia—that nervous, sweating nerve center of the whole eastern empire—was drowning in data every single day. From the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, the tendrils of Dutch commerce stretched out like the arms of some vast, hungry octopus, and they all led back to Batavia.

There was a system already, sure. Since 1615, they’d had this thing called Memorie der Nouvelles—four pages, handwritten, boring as a sermon in a language you don’t speak. It circulated among VOC officials only. No one else. God forbid the common clerk or the merchant with dirty fingernails should know what the bigwigs knew.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

The Man Who Saw the Future

Jan Erdman Jordens wasn’t like the other bureaucrats. He was something else—part merchant, part traveler, part operator. He knew how to play the game. He was secretary to Governor-General van Imhoff, which meant he had the keys to the kingdom, or at least to the filing cabinets. He also had something the others didn’t: imagination.

By 1744, there was a printing press in Batavia—had been there since 1668, actually, gathering dust and printing the occasional legal decree or prayer book. Jordens looked at that press and saw possibility. Saw the future, maybe. He thought: Why not a real newspaper? Not just for the brass, but for everyone. Well, every white European, anyway. Let’s not get crazy here.

On August 7, 1744, the first issue hit the streets—if you could call the narrow, humid passages of Batavia streets. Its name was a mouthful: Bataviasche Nouvelles en Politique Raisonnementen. “Batavian News and Political Reasoning.”

That last part—politique raisonnementen—that was the kicker. Political reasoning. Discussion. Debate. The very idea was revolutionary in a place where the only politics were the politics of obedience.

The thing is, Jordens was influenced by the Enlightenment, by those airy European ideas about reason and discourse and the marketplace of ideas. Beautiful concepts, really. The kind of thing that sounds wonderful until you try to practice it under a regime that would rather cut out your tongue than let you speak freely.

What Lived in Its Pages

The newspaper came out every Monday, four folio pages, two columns each. Jan Abel, a bookbinder at Batavia Castle, handled distribution. What was inside?

Ads, mostly. Real estate. Merchandise. Auction notices—the bread and butter of colonial commerce. Ship schedules, like a TV Guide for wooden vessels that might sink at any moment. Commodity prices. Official announcements about who got transferred where, who died of what tropical disease, who was shipping out to Europe and needed prayers for the voyage because everyone knew that sailing back then was basically playing Russian roulette with the ocean.

There were lighter touches too—party announcements, obituaries with the right amount of dignified sorrow, historical columns about Dutch churches and colonial settlements. Feature articles, basically, the 18th-century version.

But here’s the thing that nobody planned on: slowly, carefully, like a cancer growing in the dark, the newspaper started including things the VOC didn’t like. Reports on corruption. Mentions of slavery. Nothing too bold, nothing too brave—Jordens wasn’t stupid—but enough to make certain people nervous.

And in Amsterdam, in those cold counting houses where the Heeren XVII—the Seventeen Gentlemen, the supreme council of the VOC—sat and calculated profits and losses, someone noticed.

The Hammer Falls

The fear was always there, you understand. Even back in 1712, decades before Bataviasche Nouvelles, the VOC had shut down attempts to publish newspapers. They were afraid. Not just of competition from the British or French—though they used that excuse—but of something deeper. Something more fundamental.

They were afraid of voices.

The official line was security. Strategic information might leak. Ship schedules, cargo details, military positions—all could fall into enemy hands. In a world of constant imperial competition, this wasn’t entirely paranoid. But here’s the thing: the information Bataviasche Nouvelles actually printed wasn’t sensitive at all. It was mundane. Safe. Boring, even.

The real fear was simpler and more primal: they couldn’t control it completely. A semi-autonomous press in their main colony was like a gun with no safety—sure, it’s probably fine, but what if it goes off?

On November 20, 1745, the death sentence came from Amsterdam:

“Because the printing and publication of a newspaper in Batavia, recently practiced, has produced undesirable effects in this country, His Excellency will immediately prohibit the printing and publication of this newspaper upon receipt of this notice.”

Beautiful bureaucratic language, isn’t it? So clean. So final. Like a scalpel across the throat.

The letter took months to arrive—sailing ships, you know—but when it did, around mid-1746, van Imhoff had no choice. He obeyed. The final issue of Bataviasche Nouvelles was published on Monday, June 20, 1746.

Two years. That’s all it got. Two years of existence before the hammer came down.

The Pattern That Never Broke

Here’s what you need to understand: Bataviasche Nouvelles wasn’t just the first newspaper in Indonesia. It was also the first one banned. And that set a pattern—Christ, did it set a pattern—that would repeat like a nightmare for over a century.

The formula was simple: autonomous experiment, suppression, functional limitation, co-optation. Rinse and repeat.

In 1776, they tried again with Vendu Nieuws—“Auction News.” No politics. No reasoning. Just auction notices. Pure commerce. The VOC watched it like a hawk watches a mouse, and that paper survived because it knew its place. The Malays called it Soerat Lelang, the “Auction Paper,” and it minded its own business.

When the VOC finally collapsed and Daendels took over in 1810, he launched Bataviasche Koloniale Courant—a government newspaper. Official. Taxed. Controlled. The press wasn’t a forum anymore; it was a megaphone for the state.

The Ghost That Haunts

The failure of Bataviasche Nouvelles created something that lasted far longer than two years. It created a template, a model, a way of thinking about what the press should be: obedient, commercial, instrumental. A tool, not a voice.

That template held for over a century, like a curse that wouldn’t break. It took until the early 1900s, with the rise of native consciousness and newspapers like Medan Prijaji, for anyone to really challenge it. To say: No. The press can be something else. Something more.

But that first newspaper, that doomed, brief, beautiful experiment? It haunts Indonesian media history like a ghost haunts a house. Because it showed both what could be—and what wouldn’t be allowed.

And if you think that’s just ancient history, well, maybe you haven’t been paying attention. The monsters we create have a way of outliving us. They adapt. They evolve. They wait.

The story of Bataviasche Nouvelles isn’t really about a newspaper that died in 1746.

It’s about what was killed—and what that death made possible.

Everything that came after, for better or worse, was built on those ashes.