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The Correspondent to launch in English after hitting $2.5m crowdfunding goal

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By Cameron Clarke, Editor

December 14, 2018 | 3 min read

Dutch news business The Correspondent will launch an English language edition next year after crowdfunding $2.5m in less than a month.

The Correspondent

The Correspondent will launch in English in 2019

The publisher, which styles itself as “the antidote to breaking news”, met its do-or-die goal with a day to spare after attracting 43,000 backers over the last 29 days.

Its fundraising campaign had urged social media users to become year-long founding members in the new site by making a donation on a pay-what-you-like basis.

The money will be used to set up a US-based newsroom which will be operational from mid-2019.

“Thanks to all of you, we’ve set a new world record for the number of backers in a journalism crowdfunding campaign,” wrote chief executive Ernst-Jan Pfauth.

“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.”

The ad-free news business first launched in 2013 as De Correspondent in the Netherlands, where it has surpassed 50,000 paying members.

Buoyed by that success, it will now bring its unique brand of journalism – which involves collaborating with readers to create stories – to English-speaking audiences.

“Seeing journalism as a collaborative endeavour, instead of 'we tell you what's going on and you consume it', is a big part of what we hope to change in the English-speaking journalism landscape,” editor Rob Wijnberg told The Drum in November.

He added that the fundraising capital would be used to set up offices and hire a full-time team of 11, including five news correspondents.

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