NUfoto

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

~ the obituary ~

Laurens Verhagen was editor in chief of NU.nl when the Dutch trade press wrote up the launch in August 2007, and his explanation for building a separate photo site was that the main news site could not do justice to the volume of good material readers were sending in. The line he gave Adformatie is worth preserving for its date: the quality of what comes in is high, he said, especially now that everyone has a good camera on their phone. That was August 2007, which puts it a month after the first iPhone went on sale in one country.

NUfoto's tagline was "Jouw blik op het nieuws", your view on the news, and the site was organized exactly like a newsroom. The navigation across the top ran Binnenland, Buitenland, Ongevallen, Branden, Sport, Achterklap, Evenementen and Weer/Verkeer. Domestic and foreign, then accidents and fires, then sport, then gossip, then events and weather. There was a Topfoto's board, a Net binnen feed of whatever had just landed, a themed section for the Tour de France and an agenda listing what was happening tomorrow so somebody could go and shoot it.

Underneath the whole thing was a prompt that reads today like an artifact of a specific decade: "Heb je een foto of video met nieuwswaarde? upload hier je foto." Do you have a photo or video with news value. The copyright line at the foot of the August 2007 front page says Nu Foto is part of the network of Ilse Mediagroep BV, which is who owned NU.nl before Sanoma did.

~ the case file ~

~ lezersfoto ~

NUfoto was not built from zero. NU.nl had been running a Lezersfoto section since 2002, and the new site was an expansion of it rather than a replacement. You can see the inheritance on the first archived front page: the top-photographers board is headed by an account called, simply, lezersfoto, holding 6,285 photos. The next name down has 222.

So the leaderboard was topped by the back catalog, which is a quietly honest thing for a launch page to show. The five years of reader pictures that had already come in through the old section were the reason the new site had anything on it at all on day one.

~ the same day as NUjij ~

The notice went up in a yellow box on NUjij.nl, the comment platform, and it covered both products at once. NU.nl had decided to stop with the open comment platform from 12 September, new accounts were no longer accepted, and from that date it would not be possible to discuss anything through NUjij. The site would disappear. In its place a feature would be introduced inside the NU.nl site and apps through which visitors could submit photos, videos, tips and corrections.

That sentence is the whole story of what happened to NUfoto: the function survived inside the app and the place around it closed. Sanoma's stated reason, repeated in the Dutch trade press at the time, was that NU wanted to spend its effort covering the latest news instead of moderating discussions, and an upload form inside an app needs no moderation queue and no agenda of things worth shooting tomorrow.

~ what got saved ~

An ArchiveBot job was started on the site on 4 September 2016, eight days before the switch-off. It did not finish in time and the Archive Team page is explicit that nobody is sure how much of the site it covered. A warrior project was planned and never materialized. Nine years of Dutch amateur news photography went down with a partial crawl behind it.

nufoto.nl now resolves to a DPG Media Services parking page announcing that the domain is reserved for future business initiatives. DPG bought Sanoma Media Netherlands in 2020, so the company sitting on the corpse is the successor to the company that buried it.

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