Vrij Nederland
Vrij Nederland is a Dutch weekly political magazine. It appears on Saturdays, the editorial office is in Amsterdam . Vrij Nederland was a newspaper until the 1990s , after which it was gradually converted into a magazine. Frits van Exter has been the editor-in-chief since 2008 . The sold circulation in the first quarter of 2008 was 44,222 copies.
history
As an underground sheet during the German occupation in World War II
Vrij Nederland was founded during the German occupation in World War II by a group of young Protestants led by Frans Hofker, a 20-year-old operator . The first edition appeared at the beginning of September; it was dated back to August 31, 1940, the birthday of Queen Wilhelmina . The edition was initially 1,000 pieces. At the end of October of that year, Hofker's group sought contact with the assistant accountant Jan Kassies and the teacher Kees Troost, who had already distributed anti-German papers, and gave them their underground papers. Hofker and his friends continued to help spread the word. In early 1941, 65 employees were arrested, including Hofker and Kassies.
Two employees who were not affected by the arrests, Anne Henk Kooistra and Wim Speelman, wanted to continue Vrij Nederland and brought the school director Henk van Randwijk (Kooistra was a teacher at his school) as the new editor-in-chief. Under van Randwijk, there were disagreements about the political direction. The editor Gesina van der Molen wanted to see the Christian background behind the resistance better represented and found van Randwijk's attitude towards communism too positive.She finally left Vrij Nederland and helped found the underground newspaper Trouw , which became a regular daily newspaper after the war was converted. Speelman also took this step. Nevertheless, despite the large number of bloodlots , the appearance of Vrij Nederland could be ensured until the end of the war for the reasons mentioned above - a total of 74 employees were executed during the German occupation.
Development since the end of the war
After the war, Vrij Nederland was continued seamlessly and in October 1948, Johan Winkler appointed a second editor-in-chief. The newspaper positioned itself against the colonial war in Indonesia , among other things . The initially very high circulation of 109,000 copies (1945) sank rapidly. In 1949 there was almost a merger with the politically similarly positioned magazine De Groene Amsterdammer , which failed because van Randwijk was rejected by the editorial staff of the magazine as editor-in-chief and the merger was only shared by one of the two owners of De Groene Amsterdammer after a dispute his partner was targeted. The latter initiated an accelerated proceeding that put a stop to the merger outside of the editorial protest. With the help of the daily newspaper Het Parool and the publisher “De Arbeiderspers”, which took over the newspaper, Vrij Nederland was able to continue to exist with high financial losses. In February 1950, van Randwijk resigned, but remained on the staff until the end of September 1952 when he stopped working because he had not been able to print an article advocating a third route between the Eastern Bloc and the West. 1955 also gave up Winkler as the remaining editor-in-chief, the circulation at that time was only 19,000 copies.
On April 1, 1955, Winkler was replaced by the renowned Catholic journalist Mathieu Smedts , who, after his dissatisfaction with an episcopal pastoral letter , had left the Volkskrant , which at that time was still strongly linked to the Catholic Church . Smedts brought a number of authors to Vrij Nederland who were to shape the paper in the period that followed. When Smedt took office, things went uphill again, and following the spin-off of Arbeiderspers' press products in 1965 to the new, independent company Weekbladpers, in which Vrij Nederland is still published today, the circulation rose even faster than before. The social movements and unrest of the 1960s were comprehensively accompanied by Vrij Nederland , which enabled them to gain further importance on the left. However, on March 1, 1969, Smedts resigned. The occasion was an article by Joop van Tijn about the dismissal of Wim Hora Adema, editor of Het Parool , by his editor-in-chief Sandberg. After Smedts apologized for this article on the front page, the entire editorial team resigned. After mediation, the editorial team took this step back, but Smedts drew his conclusions from the incident and left the paper. Rinus Ferdinandusse was his successor .
Ferdinandusse was able to build on the success of his predecessor, in 1978 the record circulation of over 117,000 copies was reached. Even if Vrij Nederland subsequently lost some of its circulation, the newspaper was still an important paper until Ferninandusses resigned in 1996. Joop van Tijn had meanwhile joined the editor-in-chief in 1991, but died in 1997. In the 1990s, the newspaper was gradually converted into a magazine. The upheaval in the print media that began during the turn of the millennium also left its mark on Vrij Nederland , and circulation began to drop significantly again in the period following van Tijn. Van Tijn's successor, Oscar Garschagen , left the magazine in 2000 for Algemeen Dagblad . His successor, Xandra Schutte , first editor-in-chief of a Dutch weekly political magazine, took her hat off in 2004 after an email leaked to her publisher Jan Hendrik Schoo in which she gave ten editors a bad name. She was followed by Emile Fallaux , who had previously worked as a journalist for 40 years. Despite the lower circulation losses, these have not yet been stopped completely. In mid-2008 Fallaux handed over the editor-in-chief to Frits van Exter, who had previously been editor-in-chief of Trouw , among other things .
Internet
An online edition has only been available since 2003, which means that Vrij Nederland was launched 9 years later than competitor De Groene Amsterdammer , but still earlier than Elsevier and HP / De Tijd , which followed a year later. There is some multimedia content in the form of audio and video contributions, but these are not yet as regular and integrated to the same extent as in the national daily newspapers. Web feeds are not yet offered.
Previous editors-in-chief
| Henk van Randwijk | 1945-1948 |
| Henk van Randwijk , Johan Winkler | 1948-1950 |
| Johan Winkler | 1950-1955 |
| Mathieu Smedts | 1955-1969 |
| Rinus Ferdinandusse | 1969-1991 |
| Rinus Ferdinandusse , Joop van Tijn | 1991-1996 |
| Joop van Tijn | 1996-1997 |
| Oscar Garschagen | 1998-2000 |
| Xandra Schutte | 2000-2004 |
| Emile Fallaux | 2005-2008 |
| Frits van Exter | 2008– |
Well-known and / or influential editors and employees of Vrij Nederland
- The future Prime Minister Joop den Uyl was editor in the immediate post-war period.
- With her detailed interviews, Bibeb became a figurehead of the paper for decades.
Edition development
Naturally, the newspaper could not achieve a large circulation underground, at the beginning 1,000 copies were printed. After the war there was enormous interest. In 1945 the circulation was 109,000, but then dropped dramatically to a low of 19,000 in 1955. Mathieu Smedts turned the corner, in 1978 there was a record of 117,165 copies. This was followed by a slight decline, but in 1990 the value was still 90,567 copies. Since then, however, the circulation has fallen by almost half.
| Edition sold since the investigation by the "Oplage Instituut" | |||||||||
| year | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 |
| Edition | 61,634 | 55,947 | 53,669 | 53,413 | 52,868 | 50,124 | 49,244 | 47,082 | 46,671 |
literature
- Piet Hagen: Journalists in Nederland. Een Persgeschiedenis in portraits. Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam / Antwerp 2002, ISBN 90-295-2222-4 . (Dutch)
- Jan van de Plasse: Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagblad- en opiniepers / seed gesteld by Jan van de Plasse. Red. Wim Verbei , Otto Cramwinckel Uitgever, Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 90-75727-77-1 . (Dutch; earlier edition: Jan van de Plasse: Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagbladpers , Cramwinckel, Amsterdam 1999, ISBN 90-75727-25-9 )
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Het Online Instituut (Dutch / partly English)
- ↑ Some of the circulation figures from before 1999 come from politiekcompendium.nl .