The NYC campaign team in front of our Founding Members’ wall. From left to right: CEO Ernst Pfauth, campaign strategist Baratunde Thurston, operations manager Zainab Shah, founding editor Rob Wijnberg and engagement editor Jessica Best. Campaign photo by Momkai’s Martijn van Dam and Harald Dunnink

The Correspondent concludes crowdfunding campaign and raises $2.6 million thanks to 45,888 members from more than 130 countries

We will start publishing by mid-2019

Update (December 15, 2018): Our campaign has ended. In thirty days, 45,888 founding members from more than 130 countries contributed $2.6 million. Thank you all so much!

Dear founding members,

From the bottom of our hearts: thank you. In fact, thank you 42,780 times over, for your overwhelming support!

After an incredibly exciting month — with endless hours spent refreshing the counter, appearances on The Daily Show and CNN, and countless social posts by you all about our movement — you’ve helped us take The Correspondent from dream to reality.

We reached our goal of $2.5 million exactly 34 hours before the deadline. The median pledge was $30. This really is a grassroots movement for unbreaking news.

Thanks to all of you, the journalism movement we founded in The Netherlands in 2013 will now expand to an English-language platform serving and collaborating with members from all over the world. 🌍🌍🌍

You can still join at thecorrespondent.com

Thanks to all of you, we’ve set a new world record for the number of backers in a journalism crowdfunding campaign. (The previous record — 18,933 — was set during the crowdfunding campaign of our Dutch counterpart, De Correspondent, in 2013.)

Thanks to all of you, we can soon start making *unbreaking news* in collaboration with members from more than 130 countries!

Rob Wijnberg and Harald Dunnink (co-founder and creative director) on the back of our Unbreaking News van. Photo: Jeroen de Bakker

What happens next?

Now that we’ve reached our crowdfunding goal, we can move on to building The Correspondent.

Over the next six months, we’ll be hiring editorial staff and getting our website ready for launch.

We plan to officially launch The Correspondent by mid-2019. That’s when we will publish our first stories. That’s also when your one-year membership starts.

This is what you can expect from us in the meantime:

• Through the end of the year, we’ll be tying up loose ends from this campaign period, and catching up on much-needed sleep! But we’ll still be available to answer any questions you have via hello@thecorrespondent.com. You won’t get any more campaign-related emails from us.
• In January 2019 we’ll start putting out a newsletter from The Correspondent. Founding members will receive it automatically. We’ll use this newsletter to update you on our progress and to ask for your input on the topics — or “beats” — you’d be most interested in seeing The Correspondent cover.
• From February we’ll be hiring correspondents, editors, developers, and designers. Let us know if you’re interested in being part of the team here.
• Not a member yet? You can still join! Go to thecorrespondent.com and choose what you pay. (Between the end of our Dutch crowdfunding campaign in April 2013 and its launch in September 2013, another 3,000 people joined the cause.)

Campaign branding by design studio and founding partner Momkai

Congratulations, everyone, on making The Correspondent a reality!

And from all of us in the newsroom and on the campaign team, thank you so much for your support and trust.

Rob Wijnberg & Ernst Pfauth
Founding Editor – CEO
Co-founders The Correspondent

Let’s keep building our movement for unbreaking news, together!
Check out thecorrespondent.com to learn more.