After a $2.6M crowdfunding campaign, The Correspondent will have just one full-time journalist in the U.S.

After a $2.6M crowdfunding campaign, The Correspondent will have just one full-time journalist in the U.S.

The Correspondent is hiring a total of five full-time journalists.

By Laura Hazard Owen Sept. 17, 2019, 2:59 p.m.

“I felt like it was a betrayal, and we had raised funds on false pretense”: The Correspondent’s first U.S. employee speaks out

April 26, 2019

The Dutch journalism site De Correspondent raised $2.6 million to launch a U.S. — strike that, English-language — office. On Tuesday, it announced where that money is going (though Nieman Lab readers got a preview when we reported on the disconnect between the splashy messaging and the actual promised product earlier this year): It will have only one full-time journalist based in the U.S., with four others in Italy, Nigeria, India, and London.

I’ve been highly skeptical of their u.s. efforts but I didn’t think to doubt them when they told @laurahazardowen they’d have “journalists”, i.e. plural https://t.co/3dKNwFkklh pic.twitter.com/2Gszg7mVSF

— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) September 17, 2019

The U.S.-based journalist is Eric Holthaus, who will be reporting on climate change from Minnesota, though his stories won’t focus on the U.S.: “I’ll be telling stories that are collaborative, constructive, and transnational,” he wrote in a beat memo. The others are OluTimehin Adegbeye, who will report on power structures and “othering”; Irene Caselli, who will report on “the first 1,000 days” of life from Italy; Tanmoy Goswami, who will report on mental health from New Delhi, India; and Nesrine Malik, who will report on politics from London. The company’s headquarters remains in Amsterdam; there will be no New York or U.S.-based office, as The Correspondent’s early messaging had promised.

More freelance correspondents will be introduced “after launching” on September 30, Correspondent editor-in-chief Rob Wijnberg said in a Medium post, and “we’ll also be translating internationally relevant pieces by a number of our Dutch correspondents into English” (something that De Correspondent has also done in the past).

The Correspondent apologizes as Nate Silver, David Simon, and Baratunde Thurston speak out

April 30, 2019

Earlier this year, following Nieman Lab’s reporting prominent U.S. figures (Nate Silver, Baratunde Thurston, David Simon) who had served as “ambassadors” for The Correspondent’s expansion released public statements about feeling misled by a campaign that had promised to “unbreak U.S. news.” De Correspondent released an apology and offered refunds. It still hasn’t released detailed information on how it spent $1.8 million to raise $2.6 million, why it didn’t tried to correct the many news stories about the site launching in the United States, and why it led its first and ultimately only U.S. employee to believe that it would launch there. In June, it said that its operating costs for The Correspondent’ through September 30, 2020, will be $3.2 million; it also expects to pull in $555,000 from new members between now and September 2020.

Laura Hazard Owen is the editor of Nieman Lab. You can reach her via email (laura@niemanlab.org) or Bluesky DM.

POSTED Sept. 17, 2019, 2:59 p.m.

SEE MORE ON Business Models

Show tags

TWITTER FACEBOOK EMAIL