Dichtbij.nl

» see dichtbij.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Telegraaf Media Groep started Dichtbij.nl in January 2010 on an idea that sounded obvious in 2010 and sounds expensive now. National papers were shrinking, local coverage was the first thing to go, and the gap between a city desk and an actual street was wide enough to drive a business model into. Every place would get its own Dichtbij, carrying the news from your own postcode and the small businesses that would rather advertise to four thousand neighbors than to the whole country.

The man behind it was Bart Brouwers, who had come out of regional journalism and had no small ambitions for the format. An Emerce interview at the time put his target at sixteen million platforms, one for every person in the Netherlands. What got built instead was dozens of regional editions staffed by a thin paid team and filled out by residents who wrote for nothing, the people the site called meeschrijvers, co-writers. At its best it was pulling 2.5 million unique visitors a month, and in several towns a printed weekly carried the same name.

Dichtbij never left the Dutch language, which is most of why I know it as a case study rather than a habit. Local news where I live has never been a startup category. It was the city paper, and later it was whichever forum thread the people of a district happened to gather in, and nobody raised money against either. The Dutch version had a media group behind it and a map interface on the front, and it still could not work out whether the advertising from a bakery in Almere would pay for a reporter in Almere. TMG carried the answer as a loss for years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

Brouwers left in October 2013, replaced against his wishes, and the platform he had argued for stopped having anyone senior arguing for it. In November 2015 TMG announced a reorganization that closed offices across North Holland and the Randstad and cut forty of sixty jobs. Six regions went dark in the first quarter of 2016, among them Haarlem and Amsterdam, which is a strange way to run a hyperlocal network: the two places with the most local news in them were the two it could no longer afford to be in.

By November 2016, Holland Media Combinatie, the TMG subsidiary holding the wreck, dissolved the permanent editorial staff entirely. For most of the last year Dichtbij was volunteers posting into a system nobody was paid to edit.

~ the last page ~

The site's own homepage dates the end better than the press did. Through 21 September 2017 it was still redirecting into the regional map page it had used for years. By 25 September it was one short document: a green bar reading that Dichtbij.nl was no longer active, thanking every visitor and active user for their years of support, and below the bar a full-height frame loading the Noordhollands Dagblad. A goodbye note taped to a different newspaper's front door. The trade press caught up on 2 October.

~ what got buried with it ~

Everything the editors and the co-writers had published over seven years went off the web at the same moment. Not parked on a subdomain, not handed to the regional titles that inherited the audience. Deleted. Dutch media watchers had seen this exact move before, when Planet Internet's archive was wiped in 2008, and a Dutch initiative that tracks vanishing public content spent the following weeks asking TMG what had happened to the files.

This is the part that carries beyond the Netherlands. A hyperlocal site is the only outlet that ever writes down a neighborhood's small business, and Dichtbij spent seven years collecting things no national archive bothers with. The internet did not forget those pages. A company with a hosting bill decided they were not worth the disk.

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