But basically, what the difficulty is — we have always said we’re expanding to the English language. That was our idea that we tried to emphasize in every interview we did, in every communication we did ourselves, in our FAQ on our campaign site: We’re setting up in English language, and we’re going to hire U.S.-based journalists as well.

We’ve never really talked about setting up an office, because we didn’t know: Do you need an office somewhere? Where do we want this office to be? We talked about this question a lot, but we didn’t say “we’re going to set up an office here.” Because why would — we didn’t even think that was of any interest, because we always said we wanted to hire correspondents all over the world, including in the U.S., and bring this model of journalism. And the question of where your office would be is a very different question. We didn’t really think about it.

But obviously, in interviews, ambassadors are saying “they’re in the U.S. now” — which is true, because we campaigned for our platform from New York. The reason we campaigned there is because we collaborated with Jay Rosen, who’s a big inspiration to our journalism model. He was one of our main ambassadors — he was one of our first ambassadors. We also collaborated with Blue State Digital, the campaign agency that has an office in New York, so that’s why Ernst [Pfauth] and I were in New York most of the time.

So it got interpreted by a lot of media who wrote about us as, “They’re launching in the U.S.” Which is pretty much 80 percent true, in the sense that we are going to have English-language correspondents in the U.S. — just not only in the U.S. And we never promised — or never said, because that’s not our model — to have, to cover the United States or anything.

We’re not a geographically oriented journalism platform. We cover beats, which are fundamental developments that shape our world, and we try to focus on transnational developments. This has been in our FAQ all along, from the start of our campaign. We want to have correspondents; they can be everywhere, depending on their beat — in the U.S., or in Bangladesh, or in wherever is appropriate. But things get lost in translation, because we were campaigning from New York and obviously a lot of our ambassadors were American, so that’s where the confusion come from.

Here’s the summary: I can understand some people, if you got parts of our messaging, or you heard about us in other media, or you heard about us through a specific ambassador who may not have been completely clear on our messaging — then I can get why people might get the impression, “Okay, they’re opening up a U.S. office,” or something like that. But in reality, if you saw all of our messaging as a whole, it would have been clear to you that what we were saying was: We’re going to have correspondents in the U.S., and the way we organize our support and staff we’ll still have to figure out.

So that was one of the main reasons why we decided to say, let’s postpone this role. We know we want to have this role, but let’s postpone this role until after we know for sure if we make our crowdfunding goal. Because if we hire someone for this role and we don’t make our crowdfunding goal, then this job would end. We changed our minds not based on location. We changed our minds because we realized we shouldn’t hire editorial roles, we shouldn’t have non-campaign staff hired, before we know we actually can exist. That was the reasoning.

The other half isn’t. So that also, in turn, made us reevaluate the question of where to locate and build our newsroom. There were other reasons in play as well. As we explained in the piece we published, one example was that because we want to build everything, all the experience and talent and knowledge that we already have here, instead of copying ourselves and kind of starting from scratch. That was one crucial factor, alongside the company culture.

But these are all things that you kind of learn by doing. So we might have mistakenly said different things at different times, but there was never a conscious, like, “we’re acting like we’re setting this up here and now we changed our minds.” No. To us, we’ve always been open about the questions we didn’t answer yet and stuck to and still have the same answers to the questions we did answer.

Then the rest — let’s say 20, 25 percent — is from all countries all over the world. So the total number of countries is a little over 130. We have members from 130-plus countries. But the biggest chunk of those are either U.S. or Dutch. Which sounds about right, because that was where our campaigns focused most, because our networks are best in those two countries. A substantial group is also from London because we had some famous ambassadors like Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian. So that helped us get some traction in London as well. But we’ve got most press attention in the U.S., especially after The Daily Show, obviously.

Keep in mind that, especially in a campaign like this, tons of people talk about what we’re trying to do. So the idea that you can keep all these people on message all the time would be kind of totalitarian, right? We had hundreds of ambassadors spreading the word about us. If some of them said “They’re coming to the U.S.,” we couldn’t corner every one of them and say “No, no, we’re expanding to the English language.” Because there’s freedom — there’s room for mistakes in interpretation, etc. We tried to be as clear as possible in all our communication that we would be a transnational platform covering global developments with correspondents all over the world, including the United States.

But the way that this message gets covered or gets interpreted by people, especially in the United States, is, well, they’re here, they’re campaigning in New York, so they’re gonna be American. Obviously, it doesn’t help either that I’m half-American, and most of our famous ambassadors are American, our network is based in America — so obviously I can understand why people would think, okay, this is gonna be an American thing.

But eventually, I think, the reason, hopefully, why they joined is because they’re going to have interesting journalism, and they’re going to support interesting journalism that is ad-free and that goes in-depth into the forces that shape our world. Whether our office is based in Amsterdam or in Bangladesh or in Cairo or in Texas, it hopefully is not the reason why they joined.

The only thing we said was, we decided to have supporting editors, copy editors, the image editor, me — the editor-in-chief — working from our existing office. Which means something like: This is where our desk and our coffee machine and our copy editor are. This is where the person who’s tweeting will be located. And other than that, we will have correspondents writing about international developments, just like we promised. Some of them will be in the United States, just like we promised. Some of them will be in other parts of the world, just like we promised.

So the whole thing — and here’s the thing, I understand that some people might have thought, like, they’re coming to the United States, and in their heads that means you set up a newsroom, because they think the thing that really matters about journalism is where the newsroom is based. And I can understand that 12, 13, 14 people would be confused about this, and they express this on Twitter. But if you make a story out of it, then you’re kind of, how do you say this, legitimizing the confusion, or making the confusion sound true, because the idea is to make a story out of where we’re based. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s a weird thing to respond to.