Not many editors will print a plea to give their product away for free in their own newspaper. Yet that is exactly what Joris Gerritsen, editor-in-chief at The Gelderlander, did last weekend. In an opinion piece Former SP leader Ron Meyer pleaded for “closing the newspaper gap”.
Because, he writes, for him – growing up in the deprived area of Zeswegen in Heerlen – the “Krant van de Buurvrouw” was his “alma mater”. His neighbor stopped a every day Limburgs Dagblad in the hague for her bookish neighbor whose parents had no money for a newspaper subscription. At first only on days after important football matches, but eventually every day. “Her reading led to my joining,” Meyer writes. “And I even went on a trip with her. (…) Via a bend around Milan, or other European cities where Gullit, Van Basten and Rijkaard won, I also learned about our planet, our country, our city and even about my own neighbourhood.”
Editor-in-chief Gerritsen first heard Meyer’s speech in a TEDx talk. “That inspired me and, to be honest, also gripped me,” he says. “We are still very well read in some neighborhoods, but hardly in others. And as a result, we also know less about what is going on there. We only write about it when it turns out that few vaccinations are given or when hardly any people come to vote. But then we wonder too little why that is.”
Also the distribution area of The Gelderlander knows neighborhoods like Zeswegen. “The Arnhem district Malburgen, the Edese Veldhuizen or the Nijmegen neighborhood Hatert. We are there far too little. Now that I can call myself editor-in-chief, I take that to heart. When we discuss what we are going to do in the morning, we tell what we have heard in our own environment. But we don’t live there and we won’t get there.”
Seeing reading leads to reading
In Meyer’s opinion piece, he published an appeal to readers to think about ways to close the newspaper gap. It generated ideas like free newspapers in the library, in schools, in community centers. “Put everything online for free, some suggested. But yes, the newspaper also has to be paid for somehow, right?”
In any case, Gerritsen decided to give 175 families a newspaper subscription for a year in the upcoming anniversary year of his then 175-year-old newspaper. “Scientists from Radboud University Nijmegen will then follow these families for a year to see what effect reading that newspaper has.” He wants to consciously select families with children for the experiment. “Research shows that seeing reading leads to reading. And if you grow up in a family where news is consumed, you take that over.”
The editor-in-chief hopes that the free subscriptions will lead to reciprocity. “It’s not like ‘we write this, we push this down your throat’, but we want to know from those readers what concerns them and what they think we should pay attention to.”
But isn’t there more reliable information for free these days than in the days when Ron Meyer was given the neighbor’s newspaper in the morning? Websites such as NOS.nl and NU.nl are freely accessible and usually offer a reliable view of the world. “That is true, but at a local level it is different. Sometimes neighborhood bloggers and citizen journalists are active, but professional journalists who provide a translation between The Hague, the province and municipality on the one hand and the living environment of people? There is a gap there.”
With the giveaway, Gerritsen joins the tradition of The Gelderlander. “Traditionally, this was a newspaper for Catholics in an area where many Protestants live. The newspaper was a way of the church to elevate, emancipate the working class.” He cites priest and resistance fighter Titus Brandsma as an example, who was beatified this spring and proclaimed the patron saint of journalism. “Our Titus. During the war years he traveled all over the region to warn people about the Germans. At the same time he wrote for The Gelderlander, in his role as ‘censor’ on behalf of the Church. Fortunately, we shook off those ideological feathers fifty years ago, but I certainly don’t want to let go of the idea that you have a social role to play as a medium.”