de Volkskrant

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de Volkskrant
Volkskrant.svg
description national daily newspaper
publishing company De Persgroep Nederland
First edition 1919 (as a daily newspaper since 1921)
Frequency of publication working days
Sold edition Q1 / 2008: 236,364 (print) and
33,899 (e-newspaper) copies
Editor-in-chief Pieter Klok (since 2019)
Web link www.volkskrant.nl

de Volkskrant ( German  the People's Newspaper ) is a Dutch national daily newspaper with an editorial office in Amsterdam . It was founded in 1919 and is published by De Persgroep Nederland . In the first quarter of 2008, the newspaper had a paid circulation of 236,364 ( print ) and 33,899 ( e-newspaper ) copies. The editor-in-chief has been Pieter Klok since 2019 .

history

From the beginning to the Second World War

De Volkskrant was founded in October 1919 by some groups of the Catholic trade union movement and initially appeared as a weekly newspaper based in 's-Hertogenbosch . From January 1920 onwards it appeared twice a day (Mon, Wed, Fri) and at the same time was headed by Jan Vesters, an experienced journalist who had been editor-in-chief of Het Huisgezin , another Catholic newspaper, since 1898 . He did not give up his old post for de Volkskrant and continued to run Het Huisgezin until 1934. In October 1921, de Volkskrant became a daily newspaper, the publishing of which was finally taken over in 1932 by the Roman Catholic workers' association RKWV. In 1935 de Volkskrant moved to Utrecht . In addition to the national edition, local editions were added for the regions of Twente , Limburg and Noord-Brabant (each for the west and east), followed a few years later for Rotterdam , The Hague , Gelderland and the northern provinces.

From a journalistic point of view, the Volkskrant was not very ambitious in the prewar years, but the readiness of Catholics, which increased during the global economic crisis , to work with the Social Democrats did not leave the newspaper unaffected, which certainly had one or the other dispute with the Roman Catholic State Party (RKSP). did not get out of the way. This eventually led to such great tensions that in 1934 some leading politicians turned to the Dutch bishops with the request that they reprimand the newspaper, which was still relatively small at the time.

During the German occupation in World War II , the newspaper tried to walk a tightrope under pressure of content requirements, but in July 1941 Vesters, who had been editor-in-chief for 21 years, was finally forced to resign by the occupiers. The request to appoint a new editor-in-chief from the ranks of the Dutch National Socialists NSB was considered unacceptable by the remaining editorial staff and acknowledged with the complete resignation in the following month. This action was also in connection with the episcopal ban on membership in the nazified Catholic trade union movement, which was issued at the same time. The attempt by the NSB editor-in-chief, DC van der Poel, who had meanwhile been enthroned, to continue the newspaper by means of an emergency editorial office proved to be futile, as most of the subscriptions were canceled in the following weeks. The newspaper was temporarily suspended in October.

Re-establishment during the last years of the Second World War

In 1943, the publisher JHE Asberg, together with his legal advisor Carl Romme , on the board of directors of the newspaper De Tijd from 1931 to 1936 and Minister for Social Affairs from 1937 to 1939 , drafted his idea of ​​a reorganization of the Catholic press in the post-war years. It provided for a single national Catholic daily newspaper, whose mission awareness should be directed towards all parts of the people instead of just the Catholics as before. A central foundation was intended to be the publisher of this, like all other Catholic organs. However, this proposal met with divided feedback at a meeting of the main actors of the Catholic press in early 1944 (at which Vesters was absent): while the representatives of the newspapers De Tijd and De Maasbode could not get used to it, the former chairman of the RKWV, which had been dissolved since 1941, Adrianus Cornelis de Bruijn , his de Volkskrant available. The triumvirate of Asberg, Romme and De Bruijn decided to single-handedly implement their own ideas of a national Catholic newspaper. However, some compromises had to be made. Since two Catholic newspapers were already published in Utrecht, the choice fell on Amsterdam as the new editorial office. In order not to step on the feet of the local De Tijd , she was given the promise to forego an economic page and an Amsterdam local section.

The Catholic workers' movement KAB, which was founded as the successor to the RKWV and whose chairmanship was given back to de Bruijn in 1946, took over the editing of the revived Volkskrant . Romme was initially intended to be editor-in-chief on the part of his colleagues, but did not want to exercise this function alone and instead preferred to design the newspaper. At the suggestion of Asberg's secretary, Joop Lücker , formerly a foreign correspondent in London and editor of De Telegraaf , was appointed journalistic editor-in-chief for day-to-day business. Until then, Lücker had never heard of either de Volkskrant or the RKWV. Romme took on the role of political editor-in-chief as the second head and, with his position as parliamentary group leader of the Catholic People's Party (KVP), founded in 1946 as the successor to the RKSP, became both a provider of information from politics and a guarantor of backing, which he also provided as editor-in-chief in the opposite direction from the newspaper for his goals. Part of the old editorial team, including the son of the first editor-in-chief, Jan Vesters Jr., returned to de Volkskrant , Vesters Sr. was unable to do so due to reasons of age.

Established in the Netherlands in the post-war years

The newspaper was finally able to appear again on the day the war ended in Europe, May 8, 1945, from its new editorial office in Amsterdam. The day of publication was not chosen symbolically, but was due to a power failure. The paper shortage that existed in the beginning did not stand in the way of the rapidly increasing circulation in the first three years. The rise was also facilitated by the ban on publication of Telegraaf , which existed until 1949 , which was considered a collaboration newspaper , making De Volkskrant the only national morning newspaper in the early days. Furthermore, old ballast could be thrown off by the re-establishment, the newspaper now mainly addressed the urban middle classes and thus came to a broader readership base. The director Cees Slewe, who previously worked at Asberg, played a decisive role in the success of the revived newspaper, but died in 1947.

Disputes over the direction between the KVP and the KAB had an impact on the relationship between Romme and de Bruijn. After the CIP failed to win the parliamentary elections and Romme was unable to become Prime Minister, he left the editorial team at the end of 1952 due to these tensions, but at Lücker's initiative he got a column in the newspaper again exactly one year later. De Bruijn had already in September 1952 during a Cabinet Drees transferred the chairmanship of the KAB to Toon Middelhuis received ministerial post. No one was directly involved in the newspaper from the circle that had revived de Volkskrant .

Lücker continued his course and included other Catholic celebrities as authors, as he also allowed critical voices. Lücker withdrew the promises made to De Tijd when De Tijd was founded in 1953 - de Volkskrant now received an economic section and expanded local reporting, staffed by former journalists from De Tijd . Differences of opinion on a large number of topics between Lücker and Director Grundmeijer and the resentment expressed by senior editors about their authoritarian boss led to Lücker's forced resignation in March 1964. Jan van der Pluijm , employee representative on the supervisory board and chairman of the Catholic Journalists' Ring, was appointed as his successor, although he initially did not want to become editor-in-chief.

Turning away from the Catholic background

With the era of van der Pluijm, changes set in, through which the newspaper fundamentally distanced itself from its origins over the years. In van der Pluijms' inaugural year, the KAB received a successor from the Church, the Dutch Catholic Trade Union Association, NKV, who tried to influence the editorial line. Van der Pluijm managed to maintain the independence of the editorial team, and this conflict ultimately led to the end of the ties to the NAB.

The former editorial building of De Volkskrant in Amsterdam's Wibautstraat, 2009

In the same year, the move from Voorburgwal to the new editorial building located on Wibautstraat began, whereby the latter street took over the status of Amsterdam Fleet Street a little bit from the former . The church censor MJ Doesburg also appeared at the laying of the foundation stone and blessed the building. Although the Catholic newspapers at that time still had a spiritual advisor, there could be no question of church censorship, so Lücker said he had nothing to do with Doesburg or its predecessor. There was no reason to do so, since the Catholic press in Lücker's time proved to be morally strict (also out of inner conviction) and obedient to the Church. With the inauguration of the building in September 1965, the subheading “Catholic newspaper for the Netherlands” was also removed from the front page. This deletion was to be understood more as a market adjustment, since de Volkskrant was the last newspaper to list a "Catholic" in the title head . In a statement published specifically for this purpose, the newspaper emphasized that it was by no means striving to turn away from its Catholic roots, rather an attempt was made in the subsequent period to relate them to the social, political and ecumenical movements of that time.

In the second half of the 1960s, however, the gradual alienation from both the church and the CIP began. As far as the church was concerned, this was partly due to the disappointment with the course of the Second Vatican Council and the appointment of two conservative bishops in 1970. The alienation from the CIP had its origin in the end of the coalition with the CIP brought about by the right wing of the CIP Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), which met with great displeasure in the party's workers' wing. These incidents did not bypass the newspaper's executives either. Theo Coppes, who joined Grundmeijer in 1966 as the second director, switched from the KVP to the PvdA in his first year, and van der Pluijm left the church in 1970. In early 1969, the internal guideline was set to no longer use a “we” in comments with regard to Catholics.

At the beginning of the 1970s, complete separation from the Church and the CIP had become a reality. This and the subsequent shift in orientation to the left, however, was not carried out by all editors and in the individual parts of the newspaper at different speeds. The change in direction was accompanied by a change in the readership: the gradual crumbling away of the old Catholic bulwark was countered by a greater influx of new population groups such as students and left-wingers with a high level of education.

Merger with Het Parool and turning to the political left

Financial bottlenecks, advertising competition from radio and television and the NKV's realization that it would not be able to publish a newspaper on its own in the long run led to a merger with the social-democratic competitor Het Parool in 1968 after lengthy negotiations . The new joint venture was initially called “Perscombinatie” and was dominated by Het Parool with a 60:40 ownership ratio.

The former editorial building of de Volkskrant in Amsterdam's Wibautstraat, a coworking space and hotel was opened in it in 2014

At first there were disagreements that lasted for years, both between de Volkskrant and the new directorate and with Het Parool . The democratization of the editorial staff, supported by van der Pluijm, was now massively demanded and led to the establishment of an editorial council and the entry into force of an editorial statute at the end of 1973. At the same time, the newspaper made a name for itself with the inauguration of the Uyl cabinet through critical support of the ruling PvdA. The smaller left parties PPR (left-wing Christian secession from the CIP) and Democrats 66 received little attention. Incidentally, the self-assessment as a progressive daily newspaper was not visible everywhere in the editorial department itself, so women only played a subordinate role there until the early 1980s. In addition to the entry of the Protestant newspaper Trouw to the Perscombinatie in 1975, this phase also saw the expansion of a personally tinted concern journalism. The deputy editor-in-chief Jan Blokker , who was brought in from outside in 1979, saw this as one of the main problems of the newspaper, which had to be pushed back, so by the mid-1980s there was a stronger separation between report and opinion and further professionalization.

Further rise to the circulation record

In March 1982 Harry Lockefeer replaced van der Pluijm as editor-in-chief. A year earlier, when he was still head of the “Economic and Social Affairs” department, he had been appointed as his successor and was temporarily put on an equal footing with Blokker, on whom he relied to a considerable extent for a while later. An earlier candidacy from 1975 failed because of the split in the editorial team. The newspaper came to rest when he took office and was expanded significantly in terms of the number of foreign correspondents and the size of the Saturday edition. Lockefeer's time also saw the transition to IT and color printing.

Perscombinatie expanded further with the implementation of the minority stake in the publishing house "Meulenhoff & Co." in June 1994 into a complete takeover, from which the new company name "PCM Uitgevers" (Perscombinatie / Meulenhoff) resulted. If an earlier request for this failed at the end of 1988 due to the resistance of the editorial departments concerned, PCM Uitgevers finally acquired "Dagblad Unie", publisher of Algemeen Dagblad and NRC Handelsblad , from Reed Elsevier in 1995 for 865 million guilders , giving PCM Uitgevers a monopoly on all national daily newspapers the area of ​​so-called quality newspapers. In the same year, Lockefeer switched to the PCM Board of Directors in what was ultimately a short interlude and then in 1996 to the University of Groningen . He was replaced in March 1995 by Pieter Broertjes , who has been deputy editor-in-chief since 1991. One year after Broertje took over, the newspaper reached its record circulation of around 370,000 copies.

The Internet and the free newspapers as new challenges

De Volkskrant started its online edition in 1996, but also had to deal with the declines in circulation caused by the Internet and the new free newspapers soon thereafter. In September 1997, the newspaper created the position of an ombudsman who is responsible for reader complaints and who has its own column in the Saturday edition. In 2006 he was involved in an open dispute with Broertjes when a previously neglected blog by the party leader of the party “ Partij voor Naastenliefde, Vrijheid en Diversiteit ”, which advocates the legalization of sex with children aged 12 and over, on the Volkskrantblog , one standalone website that was discovered. In September 1999 the Saturday edition received a magazine as a supplement.

The new media did not mark the only upheaval at the turn of the millennium. As in other Dutch daily newspapers, the unwritten law of not too offensive reporting about the Dutch royal family, which in turn tried to influence this reporting, applied in de Volkskrant for decades. At the turn of the millennium, this practice was greatly weakened, also due to the diversification of reporting through the Internet. The questioning of the Dutch consensus system, which was increasingly emerging at the time, symbolized by the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh , did not leave the newspaper unaffected.

In February 2007, de Volkskrant and Trouw moved into the INIT-gebouw office complex after the former sister newspaper Het Parool , which had been spun off from PCM Uitgevers on January 1, 2003, had already chosen this location. In 2009 the Belgian publishing house De Persgroep took over the majority of the shares in PCM Uitgevers, the name of PCM Uitgevers changed to De Persgroep Nederland . The first significant change since then was the switch to the tabloid format , with which the newspaper followed the national trend.

After 15 years as editor-in-chief, Pieter Broertjes left the newspaper on July 1, 2010. Philippe Remarque has been appointed as the new editor-in- chief.

Internet

  • 1996: The newspaper goes online.
  • 2004: De Volkskrant also appears as an e-newspaper .
  • 2005: The Volkskrantblog weblog is founded. Readers can run their own blogs on de Volkskrant .
  • 2006: Conversion of the online edition: RSS - web feeds , podcasts and Internet TV become an integral part.

Previous editors-in-chief

Jan Vesters 1920-1941
DC van der Poel 1941
Joop Lücker , Carl Romme 1945–1952
Joop Lücker 1953-1964
Jan van der Pluijm 1964-1982
Harry Lockefeer 1982-1995
Pieter Broertjes 1995-2010
Philippe Remarque 2010-2019
Pieter Klok 2019–

Known editors and employees who shape the newspaper

  • The only internationally known employee of de Volkskrant was the writer Cees Nooteboom , who wrote columns and contributed reports as a freelancer in the years 1961–1968. His impressions of the Paris student unrest in May 1968 were awarded the Prijs voor de Dagbladjournalistiek in 1969.
  • In the Netherlands itself, the writer Godfried Bomans was by far the newspaper's best-known editor and collaborator. He was literally a collaborator from the very beginning since its re-publication in 1945 (an article of his was on the first page of the first issue) and was initially an art editor and then a copywriter for the popular comic strip Pa Pinkelman . In 1952, Bomans left the editorial team in favor of his work as a writer, but remained a columnist until 1970.
  • Henri Faas , longtime editor of the Parliament editorial in The Hague , left with his occurred in 1957 conflict with the Cabinet on the premature publication of a not yet held speech of Queen tracks in the media landscape since the conflict in 1960 establishing the Raad voor de Journalistiek led . He supported the left-wing split of the KVP, the PPR founded in 1968 , in his reporting, but then left the newspaper in 1970. 1980 Faas was a candidate to succeed editor-in-chief van der Pluijm, but was not considered due to differences with the selection committee.
  • Gabriël Smit , 1950–1960 head of the art department, then worked for de Volkskrant until 1975 and a well-known author of religious poetry at the time, reported on the Second Vatican Council , which was one of the reasons for the newspaper's distance from Catholicism. Smit's subsequent detachment from Catholicism and his participation in the time of the transition to the newspaper of the political left is exemplary for a number of other editors.
  • From 1948 until shortly before his death in 2001, the draftsman Opland helped shape the appearance of de Volkskrant with his political cartoons. Another illustrator who was associated with the newspaper for decades (1951–85) was WiBo .

Edition development

At the end of August 1939, de Volkskrant had around 27,000 subscribers. Even at the beginning of the German occupation that had existed since 1940, during which the reporting was heavily interfered with, the number rose slightly until July 1941. After the editorial team quit in the same year due to the dismissal of the editor-in-chief by the German occupiers, the newspaper lost massive numbers of readers. The last edition, published two months later for the time being, only had a print run of 4,000 copies.

De Volkskrant was able to establish itself immediately after its re-establishment and by the end of 1946 already had over 130,000 subscribers. Despite this success, the newspaper was ten years after its re-publication still behind its competitors Het Vrije Volk , Het Parool and Trouw . In the early to mid-1960s, the paid edition fluctuated around a value of around 165,000 copies. From this year on, there was continuous increase in circulation, also due to the change in the direction of the newspaper. In May 1996 the newspaper reached a record level with 368,400 copies; 25 years earlier it had become the third largest daily newspaper in the Netherlands after Algemeen Dagblad and De Telegraaf . Competitive media such as the Internet and the free newspapers metro and Sp! Ts , which appeared for the first time in 1999 , put the circulation under considerable pressure from then on. The print edition has meanwhile clearly fallen below the number of 250,000 copies, which could by far not be compensated by the new e-newspaper edition added in 2004.

Sold circulation since the investigation by the "Oplage Instituut"
year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Q2 / 2014
Print 320,844 309,608 299,739 294,459 285.048 273.046 252.821 241,249 219,303
E-newspaper - - - - - 13,376 20,773 31,240 53,347

de Volkskrant today

De Volkskrant has more than 200 editors and four domestic and eighteen foreign correspondents. There are separate editorial offices for the online and video areas. Volkskrant's sister newspapers are NRC Handelsblad , Trouw and in a joint venture with Wegener NV AD .

Offshoot

Since April 2006, Volkskrant Banen has been appearing, a free weekly newspaper in tabloid format, which focuses on academics aged up to 39 years and on the subject of work and careers. It has its own editorial team and the circulation in the first quarter of 2008 was 135,585 copies.

Political orientation

De Volkskrant is rated as left-wing liberal by other newspapers. This is also the self-image of the editorial team, as editor-in-chief Broertjes, member of the PvdA, described his newspaper as “center-left”; in an internal editorial election on the occasion of the parliamentary elections in 2006 , the left-wing parties received by far the most votes.

See also

literature

  • Joan Hemels: De emancipatie van een dagblad. Geschiedenis van de Volkskrant. Ambo, Baarn 1981. ISBN 90-263-0537-0 (History of the Catholic press in the Netherlands, company history of de Volkskrant ).
  • Frank de Vree: De metamorfose van een dagblad. A journalistieke is divorced from the Volkskrant. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1996. ISBN 90-290-5379-8 (focus on journalistic development).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Het Oplage Instituut (HOI) (Dutch / partly English)
  2. ^ The Newspaper Ombudsman, Its Possibilities and Limitations. ( Memento of the original from July 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. gep.de  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gep.de
  3. My goodness - Oh Holland: are pedos allowed to blog on Volkskrant-Site? ( Memento of the original from March 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. tazblog, October 1, 2006  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / taz.de
  4. What did Beatrix say? - The Dutch royal family has always had a difficult relationship with the press - but the media can no longer be controlled . ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Jungle World :, September 6, 2006  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jungle-world.com
  5. a b 'We gooien ons niet te grabbel, nooit' - Four lezers interview hoofdredacteur Pieter Broertjes over zijn Volkskrant . In: de Volkskrant , August 21, 2006 (Dutch)
  6. De Volkskrant vanaf 29 maart op small format . In: de Volkskrant , February 25, 2010 (Dutch)
  7. Pieter Broertjes publishes Volkskrant op 1 July . ( Memento of December 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: de Volkskrant , May 10, 2010 (Dutch)
  8. Profiel nieuwe hoofdredacteur Philippe Remarque . In: de Volkskrant , June 7, 2010 (Dutch)
  9. Raad voor de ijkpunt as discussie . In: De Journalist , October 20, 2000 (Dutch)
  10. No tear . zeit.de, October 23, 2007
  11. ^ Farewell to an era . Spiegel Online , September 11, 2006
  12. Restitution - line with a back door . In: Die Welt , April 2, 2007
  13. ^ Daughter of the Enlightenment . nytimes.com, April 2, 2005 (English)
  14. La version gauloise du thatchérism . ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. liberation.fr, May 7, 2007 (French)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.liberation.fr
  15. Redactie Volkskrant stems massaal on the left . ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Elsevier.nl, November 23, 2006 (Dutch)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.elsevier.nl