“It was piecemeal television, but very exciting,” says Jeroen Kramer, NH’s first TV presenter.
It is January 2000, the day of the first broadcast. Kramer remembers how he had to enter his texts at the last minute, operated the autocue manually with a pedal and was amazed by the chaos behind the scenes. “We had to reinvent the wheel, but that also gave us energy.”
Harmen van der Ploeg was there from the start and now works as editor-in-chief for NH. “It was as if we had two worlds next to each other: the TV was on the left, the radio on the right. It took years before those worlds really came together.”
Yet, according to him, there was also a lot of humor. Van der Ploeg remembers a blunder from one of the first broadcasts. “A deputy was accidentally referred to as a ‘victim’. You don’t forget something like that. But yes, that was part of it. Those were the pioneering years.”
Emotion journalism
The journalistic approach at the time was businesslike and distant. “Emotion was a dirty word,” says Van der Ploeg. “It was about facts, not feelings. If you asked someone how something felt, they looked at you strangely.”
That’s different now. Emotion has become a core value in journalism. “We want to touch people, involve them in the story. We didn’t do that at the time. It was mainly rational.”
Jan Visser, a familiar face at NH for over thirty years, built his reputation as a radio weatherman, but occasionally took the leap into television. “In extreme weather conditions, such as snow or storms, they sometimes came by for recordings,” he remembers. “That was always quite an undertaking.”
According to Visser, television had a different dynamic than radio. “Sometimes something had to be redone, sometimes with adjustments. It was a lot more hassle than radio, but it also had something special.”
Although he found television a welcome change, radio remained his great love. “I really felt at home there.”
A quarter of a century
What does the future of regional television look like? According to former presenter Kramer, regional TV will always have a place in the viewer’s consciousness. “National news covers the big picture, but regional broadcasters have a direct connection with the neighborhood. People want to know what is happening around the corner. That remains the core and its security of existence.”
Van der Ploeg also believes that a lot has changed in the past quarter of a century. “We have gone through a lot of development. As a regional broadcaster, we are still at the heart of society. The basis remains the same: telling stories that are close to people.”
Watch NH’s very first TV broadcast below. Exactly 25 years ago today.