De Correspondent is a Dutch news website based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was launched on 30 September 2013 after raising more than in a crowdfunding campaign in eight days. The website distinguishes itself by rejecting the daily news cycle and focusing on in-depth and chronological coverage on a topical basis, led by individual correspondents who each focus on specific topics. Sometimes it publishes English versions of its articles. The concept and initial success of De Correspondent has inspired other projects elsewhere. A German website Krautreporter was founded in 2014 and adopted the same concept. An English-language news site, titled The Correspondent, launched on September 30, 2019. The site raised through a crowdfunding campaign in late 2018, boosted by prominent backers including Jay Rosen and Trevor Noah. However, it endured substantial criticism after it was announced that it would not open an office in the United States, as many backers had anticipated.
History
The project was co-founded by Dutch journalist Rob Wijnberg, creative director Harald Dunnink, CTO Sebastian Kersten, and publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth. Wijnberg, former editor-in-chief of the Dutch newspaper, NRC Next, proposed the crowdfunding idea for an ad-free news media platform on national television in March 2013. Eight days later, he and his team reached their goal of 15,000 subscribers all paying €60 for a one-year membership. Wijnberg worked with digital creative agency Momkai and its owners, Harald Dunnink and Sebastian Kersten, served as creative director and CTO respectively. Ernst-Jan Pfauth, who had been the founding editor of The Next Web and head of digital at Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, joined as a publisher. The website went live in September 2013. By January 2015 the website had more than 45,000 paying subscribers. In January 2016 the number of paying subscribers on the website was reported to be 50,000. In 2014, De Correspondent concluded a deal with Medium’s magazine Matter, for the magazine to translate stories from De Correspondent that they believe are relevant for an international audience. The first article in the partnership concerned the hazards of using public Wi-Fi. In 2015, De Correspondent started translating stories from Dutch to English. In December 2018, an English-language newsroom, The Correspondent, reached its crowdfunding goal of to start. Its first news stories were published in September 2019.
Content
The website aims to move away from the daily news cycle by focusing on context, rather than what happened in the past24 hours. Individual correspondents lead as "guides" — deciding the news agenda and making their choices explicit. De Correspondent intends its authors to report on under-reported themes including energy, privacy, technology, and future economic trends.
Technology
De Correspondent runs on a content management system called Respondens. In several blog posts, the founders said that they might make Respondens available for other publishers in the future.
