Joop Lücker

Joop Lücker (1962)

Joop Maria Lücker (born August 9, 1914 in Nijmegen , † May 17, 1980 in Los Angeles ) was a Dutch journalist . From 1945 to 1964 he was the first editor-in-chief of the daily de Volkskrant after the Second World War .

Life

Lücker was born as the fifth child of the wealthy painter Eugène Lücker. Raised by Jesuits , he studied journalism at the University of London from 1933 to 1936 . Lücker then worked for various English newspapers and then became the foreign correspondent of the two Dutch newspapers Algemeen Handelsblad and Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant . In 1938 he moved to the Amsterdam daily de Telegraaf , where he became an art editor in 1940, but quit in 1944 due to increasing pressure from the Dutch National Socialists NSB .

In the same year, a group around Adrianus Cornelis de Bruijn , pre-war chairman of the RKWV, and Carl Romme , 1937–1939 Minister for Social Affairs, initiated the re-establishment of the Catholic daily de Volkskrant , which has not been published since 1941 . Since Romme, initially intended as sole editor-in-chief, did not want to head the newspaper alone, this group decided to appoint Lücker as journalistic editor-in-chief, while Romme became political editor-in-chief.

Since Romme had also led the Katholieke Volkspartij since 1946 , Lücker became the driving force behind the newspaper. He succeeded in building de Volkskrant within a year after its first reappearance on the day the war ended. At the beginning of the sixties, a paid circulation of around 165,000 had been reached. Romme left the newspaper in 1952 after disagreements with de Bruin, but was then persuaded by Lücker to continue working for the newspaper as a columnist.

Under Lücker, de Volkskrant was both a Catholic and a modern daily newspaper, he incorporated a number of Catholic celebrities as authors without excluding critical voices from the newspaper. In 1964, however, Lücker's time at de Volkskrant came to an end. After disagreements with the management, which had also received complaints from senior editors about his authoritarian leadership style, on a number of topics, he submitted his resignation in March of that year. Lücker's successor was Jan van der Pluijm . After he left, de Volkskrant gradually broke away from Catholicism and turned to the left. In the early 1970s, the newspaper differed significantly from the one in Lücker's time.

Lücker now devoted himself to a variety of activities, such as the founder of a press agency, an advisor to the Dutch newspaper publishers association VNU and co-editor-in-chief of De Tijd from 1966 to 1971 . In the last years of his life he concentrated on his press agency.

Although de Volkskrant gradually became a different newspaper after Lückers left, the later, even greater success of de Volkskrant built on his nineteen years of work, making him one of the most important post-war journalists in the Netherlands. Lücker's Anglophilia was reciprocated in a special way after his death: he was one of the very few Dutch people to receive an obituary in the London newspaper The Times .

Familiar

Lücker had been married since 1941 and had three daughters.

swell

Biography:

• Martin Sommer: Krantebeest - JM Lücker. Triomf en tragiek van een courantier. Uitgeverij Balans, Amsterdam 1993. ISBN 90-5018-214-3

Joop Lücker in the context of de Volkskrant:

• Joan Hemels: De emancipatie van een dagblad. Geschiedenis van de Volkskrant. Ambo, Baarn 1981. ISBN 90-263-0537-0
• Frank de Vree: De metamorfose van een dagblad. A journalistieke is divorced from the Volkskrant. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1996. ISBN 90-290-5379-8

Web links

• Biography (dutch)