With the end of De Nieuwe Gazet, piece of Antwerp history disappears (Antwerp)
With De Nieuwe Gazet, a piece of Antwerp history will immediately disappear on Tuesday. Just like Gazet van Antwerpen, this originally liberal newspaper has been a determining factor in reporting about Antwerp for decades.
Patrick Van de Perre
De Nieuwe Gazet has sung it out for 125 years. The newspaper that was founded in December 1897 on the initiative of the Antwerp mayor Jan Van Rijswijck to give the liberals a voice, will be published for the last time on Monday.
The newspaper was taken over by Het Laatste Nieuws in 1957 and slowly but surely evolved from an independent newspaper to an extensive Antwerp edition of its big brother in Brussels.
But now publisher DPG Media has decided to definitively dispose of the title under and also exclusively in Antwerp to be published under the name Het Nieuws. bids farewell to a piece of Antwerp nostalgia.
Not the best friends
Gazet van Antwerpen and De Nieuwe Gazet were certainly not best friends when they were young. The pillarization dominated society and the previous ‘Frut’ was regularly criticized openly in the liberal newspaper.
But also in the opposite direction, De Nieuwe Gazet did not always make gentle sense. They were ‘Pope Eaters’ and ‘Jewish Friends’. A terminology that, fortunately, is no longer of this time.
In the better years, De Nieuwe Gazet had a reputation to uphold as the newspaper of the freethinkers, with a lot of attention for Antwerp culture. A name that sounds like a clock was that of the late journalist Bert Verhoye.
Besides the fact that he once wanted his dog Boris to participate in the municipal elections, he was also the driving force behind the satirical theater company De Zwarte Komedie. With his columns in De Nieuwe Gazet, Bert Verhoye originally appeared several times in order to get the blood under the nails of important Antwerp politicians and other big local names.
The editors of De Nieuwe Gazet also had their office on the Rijnkaai for a while. Ironically, the place where ATV and Gazet van Antwerpen celebrated their far-reaching collaboration last week to celebrate the Antwerp news with a cake.
But otherwise not a bad word about De Nieuwe Gazet. De Nief, as the newspaper was sometimes called, produced many renowned journalists. two of them again switched to your newspaper on Linkeroever.
And what used to be an ideological battle at times, two editorial teams with totally between ideas, has turned over time into a sometimes fierce but always healthy battle between the journalists of both newspapers.
De Nieuwe Gazet has played its part and will always be inextricably linked, even for those who prefer Gazet van Antwerpen, to the Antwerp of the past 125 years.