Interview with Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Publisher of De Correspondent

This interview is the second in a series in which I talk to people who are currently working on user engagement.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth is the publisher and co-founder of De Correspondent, which received the world record amount of crowdfunding for a journalism project last year. Though the site is primarily in Dutch, Ernst writes updates in English on Medium. They get general props for not only raising a ton of money, but also for having tens of thousands of subscribers who are opting to renew for a second year.

The other thing that is special about De Correspondent is that their audience is not just an audience, but they are members of the publication and they are involved in the reporting process in many ways. Much of the interview with Ernst revolved around the member’s involvement.

What are the ways members can contribute?

They engage primarily through contributions, and can give themselves an expert title (inspired by Quora). The expert title can change based on the topic of conversation; sometimes you can be a “nurse for 25 years” and sometimes you can be a “teacher for 15 years.”

We call them “contributions,” not “comments” because we want to raise the expectations for the members. Sometimes we invite contributors for an interview or guest post. Members will have soon pages where they can write notes about their expertise and share related links.

How do the journalists interact with contributors and contributions?

Involvement starts with the attitude of the journalists. All our journalists feel the obligation and need to engage with our members, and they spend a lot of their time on this. It turns out that if you actually say what you’re going to write, then people are willing help.

For example, we’re doing a project on the the money flows in the porn industry. The journalists organized a big hackathon where scientists and journalists and members interested or knowledgable in the topic could meet together. After the hackathon, they interview the people who attended and some of the hackers helped up build some tools for scraping data.

How do you come up with ideas to report on?

The journalist always decide what s/he is going to write about, but now we let readers introduce ideas. Each correspondent has a page where they update about their research as it progresses. If you follow (members can choose who to follow),you get niche updates. That’s the area where members and journos brainstorm together

For bigger stories, they send a call-out to everyone, not just the people who follow their niche.

The IRS story was from a reader, and so was the centralization of child care one we’re working on now.

What’s the process for fact-checking contributions?

It’s really important to fact check, and everything we use from contributions is fact-checked thoroughly. For example, we had a reader email in a story about how he had some friends who were jihadists and wanted to publish it. We were emailing back and forth with him, double checking everything he said, and finally he told us he had made the whole thing up as a test to see what he could get away with. He had reached out to five publications; the rest all published it, and we were the only ones who didn’t.

Do you make every story in the pipeline public?

We always announce the stories were about to write, but keep scoops secret.

What did you do to encourage this culture where journos and the audience work together?

The journalists who wanted to work with us knew they would be working for a digital audience, and that they would have to interact. We only hire subject writers, so there is always a common interest between readers and writers.

We do have some columnists, and we’re thinking about adding contributions to those. We focus on writers with expertise, not on opinion.

Are the contributions worth all the trouble?

We have trolls that we have to ban and people still giving their opinion (as opposed to a contribution). We give members warnings, and if they continue, we’ll ban them. But 1 out of 10 contributions are so valuable that it’s worth it. It’s the responsibility of the author to check the comments.

Is there always a contributions section?

It’s a default setting to have the contributions open, but they are thinking about closing them (like on the satire column where the discussion devolves to “is this funny or not?”)

What’s been the progression of getting members to interact?

We’re still working on that curve. It helps when we’re covering something really specific; the engagement is better. 5% of our members are commenting, and they are only doing it when we really ask them for help. It’s in the 10 year plan or something like that.

You mentioned that when you spend resources on social media, you spend them on Facebook. How is that working?

Facebook has a lot of potential for future members. Members comment on the website, but people who aren’t comment on Facebook. And we have far more likes on Facebook than we do subscribers, so we want to access that population.

When a member shares an article, their name appears at the top. Why?

Because then people realize someone has paid for it. When it’s shared by you, it has your name on top because we want people to know you paid for it. Eventually we want to show how many people you’ve brought on with your sharing, and make the people who have brought on the most news subscribers into ambassadors.

How did people respond to your report detailing how the money was spent in the first year?

They liked the transparency so much that there wasn’t much criticism back.

What other engagement efforts are you working on?

Events. Every month or so we ask a correspondent to organize an event about their topic, and you can ask them any question. We had a laptop party where 200 members came and hackers were there to help. The photo editor organized a tour of a photo museum in Amsterdam. We want to meet our readers. Our attempt is to break even when hosting an event, not to make money. We charge like $5 for members and $10 for non-members; I actually think our members would be mad if we tried to make money or charged more since they already pay a subscription fee. We have a big base so all the events have been sold out.