NU.nl is a Dutch online newspaper. NU.nl writes their own news articles and employs several reporters to gather news in the field. The website has two full-time political editors in The Hague. Gert-Jaap Hoekman is the editor-in-chief of NU.nl. NU.nl is part of the Finnish media groupSanoma Media, which aside from several printed publications and websites also owns Dutch web portal Startpagina.nl. On December 10thDPG Media announced that it had acquired Sanoma Digital Netherlands, with the exclusion of the firms educational activities. The sale is pending approval from the Dutch anti monopoly watch dog.
History
The site was founded in 1999 and back then was the first Dutch news website that published news 24 hours a day. Kees Zegers, Sacha Prins, Merien ten Houten and Robert Klep were the site's founders and Joost Boermans and Charlotte van Berne were its first editors. The site was a joint venture of Ilse Media Groep b.v. and Virtual Industries Online Marketing Solutions b.v. In 2001 Nu.nl changed hands to Sanoma, when Ilse Media Groep was bought by VNU. In 2002 Rogier Swagerman became editor-in-chief. Together with Wiggers he started collecting pictures from readers. These pictures were offered to news agencies. In 2002 NU.nl made a mobile version of its site available for use. In 2006 Swagerman was replaced by Laurens Verhagen. In 2007 the website got several subpages or extensions. NUsport for sports news and NUzakelijk for financial and business news. The site started collecting readers' commentaries. On NUjij people could comment on news stories and upload their own. On NUfoto photographers could send in photographs of recent events. In 2008 a map was added and later more expansions followed, of which NU&toen and NUlive were the most important. NU&toen is a continually expanding historical image library where events from the past are recalled via old photographs. NUlive was made to filter news from the big number of Dutch tweets that are published daily. In 2009 a German version of NU.nl was launched, based on the Dutch site. This site was cancelled in 2011 however, because of disappointing visitor numbers. The site published a free printed newspaper to commemorate its 10th anniversary. In 2011 NU.nl's appearance was altered. The alterations were made to make NU.nl more readable on bigger monitors and to stay with the times. The most important NU websites are since then displayed on the top of the website. On November 18, 2011, editor-in-chief Laurens Verhagen suddenly left NU.nl due to an internal disagreement, and was succeeded on May 11, 2012, by Wouter Bax, who came from the Dutch newspaperTrouw. On June 25, 2013, it became public that Bax would be leaving NU.nl. He was succeeded on July 1, 2013, by Gert-Jaap Hoekman, who until that point had been deputy editor-in-chief.
