We got out more this year. Bas in front of Joost Klein’s hotel in Malmö following Cornald Maas’s “Fuck the EBU” interview.

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Eurovision update from Malmö:
​​​​​​​‘Joost Klein’s disqualification highly unusual’

NU.nl: showing our face(s)

Old photos of youthful team members in now defunct NU.nl columns. Memories of aGerman version of NU.nl, multidaylive streamsof the Nijmeegse Vierdaagse walk and night-shift editing. Interviews about Pim Fortuyn and his work as a columnist, Donald Trump’s first election victory and our very own coverage of the pandemic.

Our 25-year anniversary was the talk of the editing department this year. We gathered all these anecdotes and placed them along a timeline of tops and flops. The result is here.


This much became clear: we’re no longer an obscure domain name hosting messages by the ANP news agency, accompanied by a light grey, barely legible credit line.


We’re proud to show the names and faces of our team. We’re Tim and Afran, Priscilla and Edo, Emma and Jeroen. In an age where the boundaries between real and fake, human and AI are fast blurring, showing who you are is key to forming a bond with an audience of millions in the Netherlands.

War zone

Reporters Matthijs le Loux and Bas Scharwachter undertook our first major trip to a war zone. We realise many larger media outlets have gone before us. Which is why we took a different approach: parts of Matthijs’ and Bas’ coverage was decided by tips and questions sent in by our visitors. Why? Because NU.nl is a collaborative effort between us and them.


Names like ‘Fred’, ‘De Leeuw’ and ‘de kapelaan’ were often mentioned in our daily meetings with our Ukraine reporters. These were all usernames of NU.nl account holders or their contacts, whose input enabled us to share stories on the ground that would otherwise have gone untold. 

NUjij: how we keep the comments section constructive

A look behind the scenes at NUjij, our discussion platform, reveals the challenges faced by online moderators. They must strike a balance between open debate and mutual respect among a million comments a month. Some subjects are more sensitive than others, and it’s the latter that sometimes require creative solutions and decisive action. 

At the start of 2024, I found myself moderating our discussion forum NUjij as part of a ‘work experience day’... at my own company. Faced with almost a million comments a month, the pressure is on for NUjij’s editors. I had to experience it for myself – and every comment felt like an attack. 


“What are they on about?”, I uttered to myself a couple of times. I realised that some of my reactions to comments were fuelled by gut instinct. “Why are you blocking this comment and on what policy grounds?”, asked my ‘supervisor’, keeping me on my toes.


“I’ve never seen Lindsay as panicked as during her first moments moderating comments on NUjij,” said one of the editors that afternoon. No word of a lie there.

The beating heart of NU.nl

As our fan forum, NUjij is the beating heart of NU.nl. Our users leave thousands of comments each month or year, the majority legitimate. They learn from each other, and we also learn a great deal from them. Not only do they flag errors, they also share ideas for coverage that never would’ve occurred to us – because their perspective is different from ours.

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As our fan forum, NUjij is the beating heart of NU.nl. They learn from each other, and we also learn a great deal from them.

From the editorial board

‘The comments section for this blog will likely need to be closed.’

But this summer saw us take the drastic measure of closing comments on articles about Israel and Hamas. It’s not something that’s in line with our vision: NU.nl as a source of collaborative journalism with our visitors, led by an open discussion of all topics.


Sadly, we could no longer stem the tide of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and fake news in comments about the Israel-Palestine conflict. We strive for constructive debate, but even with the help of our moderation bot Maura, we couldn’t fulfil that aim.

Moderation bot Maura screens a large portion of the comments on NUjij (nearly a million per month), rejecting those that don’t comply with the community guidelines. Maura learns which comments to approve based on the decisions made by our human editors. The above fan art of Maura was made by a NUjij poster.

Keeping it clean

That didn’t mean giving up, however. Our editors came up with an alternative: from now on, three times a week, an additional team of editors will be moderating an informal discussion of this topic for a few hours.


This goes to show we won’t throw in the towel that easily – no matter how polarising the topic, no matter how many death threats we receive. 


We often call on visitors to keep the comments section clean, as you can read in the blog by our editor-in-chief about the riots in Amsterdam following the match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Because at the end of the day, we’re all people.

Lindsay Mossink

Hoofdredacteur NU.nl

In the run-up to the US presidential elections, Ludo van Uden gained first-hand experience of the country’s fentanyl crisis. A support organisation in Kensington helps people who have become addicted to this life-destroying drug. 

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In Amerika's 'Zombieland': 


'De omvang van deze crisis is enorm.'

Vlogging: opening eyes to major news

NU.nl visitors have started calling our reporters by their name. It’s testament to the connection they feel to our team, and one of the reasons why people have been coming to local theatres to experience our Formula 1 reporters’ commentary live. in the theatre.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if the Gossip column soon did the same: Roos de Ridder, Lara Zevenberg and Michiel Vos have been hosting a lively podcast, launched this year, about Dutch and international celebrities.


In line with our mission to involve visitors in our reporting, we’ve been running vlogs at various events this year, including the UEFA EURO 2024. 


Our reporters have been making explainer videos for years. But this year, we decided they’d be the main character.

One of them, NU.nl reporter Ludo van Uden, travelled to the US to gather first-hand accounts of top issues on voters’ minds. He experienced the country’s fentanyl crisis up close. In this video, Ludo addresses the viewer and shows harrowing images of addicts, uttering a hard-hitting yet heartfelt: ‘oh dear’. The vlog cuts to a scene on the street, and then Ludo himself.

NU.nl’s recently updated TikTok account offers the same level of intimacy. We’re now working with TikTok stars to make sure we only create content that truly resonates with young people.

The year in numbers

How high is our daily reach? How many articles do we write in a day and what rating does NU.nl get from its subscribers?

View all figures of 2024