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Derk Sauer
Derk Sauer (31 October 1952 – 31 July 2025) was a Dutch journalist and media proprietor who was the founder of The Moscow Times.
Sauer took his Hogere Burgerschool final exams in 1969 at the Casimir Lyceum in Amstelveen and, as a student, worked for director Gied Jaspars on the VPRO program Morgen. At the age of 14, he founded the "Action Group for World Peace" and organized a demonstration in Amstelveen against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. After a short period working at the Maple Leaf chewing gum factory, he permanently moved into journalism.
Sauer began his journalistic career at De Tribune—the party newspaper of what was then KEN (ml), now the Socialist Party (SP), when Koos van Zomeren was editor-in-chief there.
In 1970, at the age of 19, Sauer went to Northern Ireland to report on The Troubles for, among others, VPRO radio and De Groene Amsterdammer. In Belfast, he rented a room from the local IRA commander on New Lodge Road, an IRA stronghold.
In the early 1970s, he worked with journalist Fons Burger for the VVDM’s monthly magazine Twintig. Starting in 1975, Sauer and Burger wrote as a duo for the weekly magazine Nieuwe Revu. Together with Adriaan Monshouwer, they also founded "Tilt Film" and, along with Bob Visser, created the VPRO TV program NEON. For BBC Panorama, they traveled from Hanoi to Saigon, filmed in Kurdistan and with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and produced the documentary Een Koninkrijk voor een Huis ("A Kingdom for a House") about the squatters' riots during the inauguration of Queen Beatrix.
From 1982 to 1989, Sauer was editor-in-chief of Nieuwe Revu. Under his leadership, well-known journalists, columnists, and cartoonists such as Frits Barend, Henk van Dorp, Boudewijn Büch, Henk Spaan, Ischa Meijer, Karel Glastra van Loon, Gerrit de Jager, and Erwin Olaf also joined the magazine.
At the end of 1989, Derk Sauer moved to Moscow with his wife, Ellen Verbeek, and their young son at the invitation of VNU to set up a joint venture with the Moscow branch of the Russian Journalists' Union. The goal was to launch the first Russian glossy magazine, Moscow Magazine. According to Sauer, however, his Russian colleagues turned out not to be journalists but KGB agents.
In 1992, VNU withdrew from Russia, and Sauer and his business partner Annemarie van Gaal decided to stay. Together with the Novamedia group, they founded the publishing company Independent Media in 1992. That same year, they launched the English-language daily The Moscow Times. Initially, the paper was distributed for free, but when it switched to paid subscriptions, Sauer and Van Gaal continued to incur losses despite its popularity. Van Gaal then entered into a joint venture with Hearst to publish Cosmopolitan in Russian, with Ellen Verbeek becoming co-editor-in-chief. Russian editions of Playboy, FHM, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, and Men's Health followed, turning Independent Media into an international multimedia company and eventually a market leader in Russia.
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Derk Sauer
Derk Sauer (31 October 1952 – 31 July 2025) was a Dutch journalist and media proprietor who was the founder of The Moscow Times.
Sauer took his Hogere Burgerschool final exams in 1969 at the Casimir Lyceum in Amstelveen and, as a student, worked for director Gied Jaspars on the VPRO program Morgen. At the age of 14, he founded the "Action Group for World Peace" and organized a demonstration in Amstelveen against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. After a short period working at the Maple Leaf chewing gum factory, he permanently moved into journalism.
Sauer began his journalistic career at De Tribune—the party newspaper of what was then KEN (ml), now the Socialist Party (SP), when Koos van Zomeren was editor-in-chief there.
In 1970, at the age of 19, Sauer went to Northern Ireland to report on The Troubles for, among others, VPRO radio and De Groene Amsterdammer. In Belfast, he rented a room from the local IRA commander on New Lodge Road, an IRA stronghold.
In the early 1970s, he worked with journalist Fons Burger for the VVDM’s monthly magazine Twintig. Starting in 1975, Sauer and Burger wrote as a duo for the weekly magazine Nieuwe Revu. Together with Adriaan Monshouwer, they also founded "Tilt Film" and, along with Bob Visser, created the VPRO TV program NEON. For BBC Panorama, they traveled from Hanoi to Saigon, filmed in Kurdistan and with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and produced the documentary Een Koninkrijk voor een Huis ("A Kingdom for a House") about the squatters' riots during the inauguration of Queen Beatrix.
From 1982 to 1989, Sauer was editor-in-chief of Nieuwe Revu. Under his leadership, well-known journalists, columnists, and cartoonists such as Frits Barend, Henk van Dorp, Boudewijn Büch, Henk Spaan, Ischa Meijer, Karel Glastra van Loon, Gerrit de Jager, and Erwin Olaf also joined the magazine.
At the end of 1989, Derk Sauer moved to Moscow with his wife, Ellen Verbeek, and their young son at the invitation of VNU to set up a joint venture with the Moscow branch of the Russian Journalists' Union. The goal was to launch the first Russian glossy magazine, Moscow Magazine. According to Sauer, however, his Russian colleagues turned out not to be journalists but KGB agents.
In 1992, VNU withdrew from Russia, and Sauer and his business partner Annemarie van Gaal decided to stay. Together with the Novamedia group, they founded the publishing company Independent Media in 1992. That same year, they launched the English-language daily The Moscow Times. Initially, the paper was distributed for free, but when it switched to paid subscriptions, Sauer and Van Gaal continued to incur losses despite its popularity. Van Gaal then entered into a joint venture with Hearst to publish Cosmopolitan in Russian, with Ellen Verbeek becoming co-editor-in-chief. Russian editions of Playboy, FHM, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, and Men's Health followed, turning Independent Media into an international multimedia company and eventually a market leader in Russia.