The Correspodent Case Study
It all started on 30 September 2013 in Amsterdam, Netherlands after Rob Wijnberg & Ernst-Jan Pfauth (organization’s founders) conducted a crowdfunding campaign and raising more than €1 million in(only) eight days. The organization stands as a membership-driven news room project that rejects the daily news cycle and tries to bring context to the news by collaborating with their readers and promises unbreaking news.
Six years later,on 30 September 2019 , they decided to launch the English-language version named The Correspondent. Following a technique similar to that used to establish the “mother” organization, they raised US$2.6 million through a crowdfunding campaign in late 2018 boosted by prominent backers including Jay Rosen and Trevor Noah. But things went sideways this time.
People with different backgrounds and interests felt like they had a voice through Correspondent’s news site . Αnd that is -paradoxically- one of the reasons that led The Correspondent to shut down on 31 December 2020.
The organization at fisrt promised to create headquarters in New York City, but after the process of crowdfunding was complete and they raised the necessary amount of money, it became known to the public that De Correspondent’s founders weren’t planning to launch a site in the United States at all. That fact seemed like a betrayal for all the people trusting and supporting them, because they felt like they raised founds on false pretense.
The news was first published by the organization itself and the claim was that they should stop publishing due to the COVID-19 pandemic that made the news cycle model “unsustainable” and therefore they could no longer focus on any news other than that.
As their story continues to unfold, both founders felt a deep sense of responsibility towards their partners and their audience and therefore they committed to further elaborate on the reasons that led them to failure.
Αt the same time they urge their readers to continue to support independent journalism and to be informed about that through the Membership Puzzle Project (MPP), an organization founded by the NYU and which is considered to be a public research project that studies, among other things, how news organizations can turn their strongest supporters into members.
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