Henk van der Meijden (born 26 June 1937, in

The Hague The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital o ...

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

) is a Dutch

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...

and producer of theater and circus acts. Known as the "godfather" of Dutch gossip journalism, he founded a weekly gossip magazine, Privé, and edits the gossip pages of '' De Telegraaf''.

Biography

Henk van der Meijden grew up in

Bezuidenhout Bezuidenhout (; en, "South of the Wood") is the neighborhood ( nl, wijk) southeast of the Haagse Bos neighborhood of The Hague in the Netherlands. Bezuidenhout includes the Beatrixkwartier financial area near the Central Station and streets su ...

, a neighborhood of

, as the elder of two in a working-class family. At age 16 he started writing children's stories for the publication ''

Het Vaderland The ''Algemeen Dagblad'' () or ''AD'' () (English: "General Daily Paper") is a Dutch daily newspaper based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. History and profile ''Algemeen Dagblad'' was founded in 1946. The paper is published in tabloid format and is ...

'', an evening daily. For the '' Haagsch Dagblad'' he reported on social events and funerals, and after finishing his secondary education became an apprentice journalist at the '' Nieuwe Haagsche Courant'', where he got his own column. He wrote short stories for other publications and in the 1960s also wrote for the women's magazines '' Margriet'' and '' Libelle''. Van der Meijden's long career with '' De Telegraaf'' started officially in 1958, after he had written a series of reports about poor conditions in the Dutch armed forces. His first job was as a crime reporter in The Hague, and in 1959 he was transferred to the main office in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

, where he got his own section, the showbiz pages, which quickly became the most popular section of the paper. At the end of the 1960s he named this section Privé. In 1977 he founded a weekly magazine, also called '' Privé'', an extension of the showbiz pages in ''De Telegraaf''. A television program, TV Privé, was soon aired by

TROS Tros or TROS may refer to: * 18281 Tros, an asteroid * Transformer read-only storage, a type of read-only memory * TROS, a Dutch broadcasting union, originally an acronym for Televisie Radio Omroep Stichting * Tros (mythology) In Greek mytholo ...

. He retired as Privé's editor in chief in 1997, and in 2002 he retired from ''De Telegraaf'', to be succeeded by Wilma Nanninga. Since 1966 van der Meijden has been active as a producer of theater and entertainment, and in the 1970s began bringing international circus acts to the Netherlands. With

Joop van den Ende Johannes "Joop" Adrianus van den Ende (born 23 February 1942) is a Dutch theatrical producer, co-founder of international television production company Endemol and founder/owner of Stage Entertainment, Europe's largest live entertainment compan ...

and Benoit Wesley he was co-owner of the Circustheater in Scheveningen in the early 1990s.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Meijden, Henk van der 1937 births Living people Dutch theatre managers and producers Gossip columnists Journalists from The Hague