RobWijnberg

I understand that journalists defend their work when I criticize it, and I respect them for it.

I direct my criticism at news-as-a-phenomenon or the news industry as a sector; I avoid criticizing specific media or journalists.

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At The Correspondent, we try to let constructive criticism work to our advantage and embrace it. We think that if you criticize, you should be able to receive criticism as well. And I think that's the best attitude other publications can have too.

Thank you for your question, Cookinho.

First: it's good to know that we see ourselves as expanding to the English-language rather than duplicating our publication in the US. We're expanding into a different language, not just a new country.

Second: to your question on biggest differences. Obviously, the scale of everything is greater. That brings challenges to safe guarding company culture. Working remotely and in different time-zones with future correspondents will be more challenging than working from a country where you can travel to all corners within three hours.

Third: there are more high-quality competitors. That means we have to work even harder to differentiate ourselves.

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Fourth: The English-language public sphere is even more polarized than it's Dutch counterpart. So, there will be more cultural and ideological differences to bridge.

Sorry to hear about the last Kickstarter you backed.

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I can promise you this: If you decide to join us, and we don’t hit our $2.5 million funding goal by midnight on Friday, we’ll give you your money back in full.

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And if we do hit our goal (we’re on track, as we speak!), you’ll get a year’s worth of in-depth journalism in return. With your money, we are going to hire talented, knowledgeable correspondents whose goal it is to help you understand the underlying forces that shape our world, and collaborate with you on telling stories about our most pressing problems and what we can do about them. Your membership will start when we launch (before mid 2019).

Being ad free is not just a nice way to get rid of annoying banners. It’s crucial to rebuilding a relationship of trust with with readers, viewers, and listeners. At De Correspondent in The Netherlands, we’ve been ad free for five years now. This means we don’t take ad dollars of any kind. No banner ads, no sponsored content, no native ads. And we’ll adopt this same approach at The Correspondent.

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The most important reason why we’re ad free stems from how we see you: our audience (although we never use that word, for reasons I'll explain). When news is (mostly) funded by advertisers, your attention is the product being sold. In the ad model, the news itself is mainly a means to capture your attention. That’s why you see a lot of sensationalism in the news.

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Being ad free means: less incentives to grab attention for attention’s sake — and more incentives to inform you in the best possible way. Put differently: because we’re paid by you, we can focus completely on helping you understand the world around you.

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This, in turn, also means: we don’t see you as a “target audience”. Because of the ad model, news media executives came to see “the audience” not so much as citizens to be informed, but as demographics to be reached. Because advertisers want to know if they’re reaching “the right audience”.

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At The Correspondent, we see our members as engaged, curious citizens, not as “consumers” to be put into brackets like ‘postmodern hedonist millennial’ or ‘affluent conservative retiree’. We don’t care about your “demographics”.

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And, because we don’t see you as a “target audience”, we don’t need to collect much data about you either. Being ad free enables us to be mindful of your privacy. We don’t need to know what paycheck you bring home or what breakfast cereal you like.

I agree that solutions are complex in the sense you say they are. We advocate so-called constructive journalism because we don't want our journalism to make you cynical about the possibility of change. Also, we believe that progress is possible and that by shining a light on possible ways to solve our problems, we can help bring about that positive change.

The reason for this mainly is, if you don't think a better world is possible, why would you want to inform yourself about it in the first place? To me, being interested in the world is directly linked to believing in the possibility of making it better.