During our crowdfunding campaign last year, and in the months since, we’ve frequently been asked: Where will The Correspondent be based?
After a lot of thought, we can now answer that question with clarity: we will have correspondents around the world, including in the United States, and all of the core supporting roles will be based at our current HQ in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Some of you will be surprised and perhaps disappointed that we won’t have a separate newsroom somewhere in the US, so I want to explain how we came to this decision.
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Throughout 2018 and until last month, we had a campaign office in New York City. We knew there were lots of people across the United States who, like us, wanted to change what news is about, how it’s made, and how it’s funded.
We often talked about The Correspondent coming “to the US and beyond”, the majority of our ambassadors were US-based, and we thought this campaign office might evolve into a US newsroom (which is why we advertised for a Managing Editor there before our crowdfunding started).
Our US founding members were crucial to reaching our crowdfunding goal: around 40% of those who backed The Correspondent were in the United States, and without them we would not be on track to launch your unbreaking news platform on September 30, 2019.
But we also knew there would be other English-speaking communities around the world who would want to join this movement — and we were bowled over when founding members from more than 130 different countries around the globe contributed to our campaign.
We don’t aim to be a national US news organization but to cover the greatest challenges of our time across the globe, in the English language, with the help of our members. We have an amazing community of 49,000 people who we hope will feed their knowledge and experience into the unbreaking news we’re covering.
There are other reasons why we believe Amsterdam is a good choice. It has lower costs than many global cities, including those in the US. Basing our core support staff in the Netherlands — and having overheads for one office, instead of two — means we can put more of your money into journalism around the world, including in the US.
Colleagues at our Dutch edition, De Correspondent, have a deep knowledge of what it takes to run an unbreaking news platform. This will be invaluable as we build The Correspondent. And as our CEO Ernst wrote on Medium this week, we want to build one company culture, which can be challenging as the distance between teams grows.
Members who read about this decision elsewhere have shared with me that they feel misled because they had a reasonable expectation from our crowdfunding campaign that we would open an office in the US. I am truly sorry for this. As an organization built on a commitment to transparency and trust, we recognize how serious this is. We should have communicated with you as our thinking evolved and you should have heard this from us first, rather than on Twitter or via other news outlets. We will learn from this, and do better in the future.
I’ve tried to explain here why we’ve taken this decision in order to build an unbreaking news platform you can be proud of, but we’re always open to hearing your feedback and encourage you to share your questions with us by replying directly to this email (we read all messages sent to hello@thecorrespondent.com and you will receive a personal reply).
In the meantime, here are some other important questions we’re considering as we build The Correspondent.
- What topics should The Correspondent be reporting on? What development in the world do you consider underreported in the news and worthy of more attention? Share with us here.
- What structures can we build to make sure we hear you every step of the way? Reply to this email to let us know how you’d like to share your thoughts and knowledge with us.
These are questions we want your input on, and we’ll also be sharing our thoughts with full transparency as we head towards September 30.
Until next time,
Rob Wijnberg
Founding Editor
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