When Rick Nieman stepped down this spring as anchor of RTL News in Amsterdam after 19 years in front of the camera, he was surprised at the tributes he received.

“I got many emails and even old-fashioned post cards from viewers who said they were sad to see me go,” he said. “You don’t think about it when doing your job, but apparently you become part of people’s lives. And when they tell you how much of a part, it’s humbling. A Bosnian War refugee, for instance, thanked me for ‘teaching’ her Dutch. She learned the language, she said, by watching our broadcasts.”

Until his retirement, Nieman, 50, was widely recognized as Holland’s most watched and most influential television journalist. His 7:30 p.m. broadcasts on RTL were seen by 1.5 million viewers every day in a country of 17 million inhabitants. For comparison, NBC Nightly News is watched by about 8.5 million people, but the United States has a population of 318 million.

As those statistics show, news, especially international news, is very popular in the Netherlands and Nieman, who is fluent in Dutch and English and also speaks German, Italian and French, regularly interviewed world leaders when they came to Holland. Over the years, he has talked with Madeleine Albright, the Dalai Lama, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Bill Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, among many others.

Learning From the Best

Nieman’s path to being a “news presenter” began in 1983 when he came to Roosevelt as an American Cultural Exchange student. Unlike many of his colleagues who wanted to study at a large state university, his objective was to go to a university in a large city where he could learn journalism from practicing professionals.

“I had a wonderful experience at Roosevelt,” he said. “The professors were either former or current practicing journalists with a lot of experience. They gave us very practical assignments. I remember one semester my beat was the Cook County Court system and I had to write a background story and a feature story about it every week. What I learned there, I have used daily ever since. I am really incredibly grateful for my time at Roosevelt.”

One person Nieman particularly respected is Charles-Gene McDaniel, who headed Roosevelt’s journalism program from 1979 until 1995. A former Associated Press writer, McDaniel was a first-rate writer and teacher who, after he retired, visited Nieman in Amsterdam. “Professor McDaniel instilled in us a tremendous feeling of fairness,” he said. “He was very much into the ABCs of journalism – accuracy, brevity and clarity. We had to get the facts straight. He was not very kind if you did sloppy work.”

During his four years at Roosevelt, Nieman lived in the Herman Crown Center residence hall and was active in school activities. He was editor of Roosevelt’s student newspaper, The Torch and was a member of Roosevelt’s soccer team that was ranked 16th nationally in the NAIA and beat the University of Notre Dame. “We had a Serbian coach and nobody on the team was actually born in the U.S.,” he recalled. “We had Iraqis, Iranians, Haitians, Yugoslavians and just one Dutchman, me. Truth be told, I was substitute and didn’t play much, but I loved being on that team.”

“I had a wonderful experience at Roosevelt.”

After graduating from Roosevelt, Nieman received a scholarship to earn a master’s degree from the University of Southern California (USC) where he studied international relations and journalism. He then joined a small business news organization that was acquired by CNN shortly after he was hired. All of a sudden at the age of 25, he was an on-air reporter for CNN in London specializing in financial news.

“It’s a bad anecdote about our society and being a television reporter,” Nieman said, “but an instructor at USC once told me: ‘You’re young, you’re blond, you speak reasonably well, you’re made for television. You should be a TV reporter.’ I was insulted at the time, but she was probably right.”

In 1991 he decided to move back to Holland and accepted a position as a reporter with RTL News. The station is part of RTL Group, Europe’s leading entertainment network with interests in 55 television channels around the world. After serving as a general assignment reporter, the Roosevelt alumnus was selected as RTL’s anchor in 1996 and he held that position until May when he decided to leave in order “to write more, travel and work on other journalistic projects.”

Politics, American Style

To glean ideas for his newscasts, Nieman regularly watched American television. “Of all the countries in Europe and the United Kingdom, we’re the most Anglo-American focused,” he said. “Germany is our biggest trading partner, but the Dutch don’t speak German all that well. They speak English and they’re very focused on the U.S. I read the New York Times every day and already did stories about the 2016 U.S. Presidential election even though the Iowa caucuses are still many months away.”

However, it was elections in the Netherlands that helped make Nieman so well known. Like George Stephanopoulos or Bob Schieffer in the United States, he moderated debates with all the major candidates and then anchored the election results and provided analysis on what the results meant for the parties and country. Every major political leader in the Netherlands has been grilled by Nieman on such topics as the future of the Dutch economy and the effects of budget cuts on Dutch citizens.

When they come to Amsterdam, international leaders frequently visit RTL news and Nieman was often the reporter who interviewed them. His most memorable interview, however, occurred in a hotel room in Luxemburg where he was attending the European Union–United States Ministerial Summit in 2005.

He was the first person to talk with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following a major announcement by North Korea. He began the interview by saying: “Ms. Secretary, North Korea just announced for the first time publicly this morning that it has nuclear weapons. What is your reaction to this?” Rice replied that the North Koreans were “only deepening their isolation in the international community” and “there needs to be no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula in order to maintain stability in the region.”

When Nieman opened the hotel door after the interview, there were 30 journalists from around the world waiting to ask him what she said. “Our timing was very fortunate,” he recalled. “Our interview was picked up by CNN and other stations and there was a front page article in the New York Times the next morning.”

Nieman also has interviewed President Bill Clinton a number of times as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom he quizzed about the use of Dutch troops in Iraq as part of the military coalition during the Iraq War.

And during a TV interview in 2013 to discuss their upcoming royal inauguration, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and his wife Princess Máxima surprised the nation by telling Nieman that citizens can address them “any way they see fit.” “People in the street call me Máxima. At the end of the day, it’s not that important to be called princess or queen. The important thing is the title we represent,” Máxima said.

Nieman describes his interview style as being tough, but fair. “If people don’t want to answer a question, I gently try to say you didn’t answer the question and give it another shot. But after I’ve asked it three times, I say, ‘I understand you don’t want to answer, let’s move on to the next one.’”

In addition to anchoring and interviewing, Nieman is an accomplished author, whose book Always Viareggio was published in Spring 2015 to favorable reviews. It tells the story of four high school and college friends who make an annual motorcycle trip to Viareggio, Italy. One critic wrote that Always Viareggio “might move you to think about your own life and friendships.”

Nieman is married to Sacha de Boer, a former news anchor on a competing network. De Boer is now a professional photographer who shoots for National Geographic among other publications.

As to the future, Nieman said he received a number of offers the moment he announced his departure. One of those was hosting a Sunday-morning news show on another network, which he began doing this fall. Odds are his legion of news viewers are tuning in.