About the closure

Why are you discontinuing?

The decision to discontinue The Correspondent was made due to financial setbacks, making our English language newsroom financially unsustainable. We saw a surge in membership cancelations, with members often citing increased insecurity in their personal financial situation. The average membership fee of our choose-what-you-pay-model also lagged behind budgetary needs.

How many people are leaving the company?

We sadly have to say goodbye to 10 amazing colleagues. You can see who is part of the team here. If you know of any job opportunities, do reach out to us via hello@thecorrespondent.com and we will gratefully pass them on.

When did you inform your employees?

We informed our staff on the morning of 10 December, in a group virtual meeting, and then had conversations with each individual about their severance package and future. Everyone has been given an opportunity to review the offer and reviewed both this letter and the FAQs.

What arrangements do you have for your employees?

The Correspondent’s full-time staff will be offered a severance package and transition fee in accordance with Dutch labour law. Several Dutch staff members who worked for The Correspondent will continue working for De Correspondent as of 1 January 2021.

What are the consequences for your freelance contributors?

Articles that were planned to go online before the end of the year will still be published and paid for in full. Copyrights to all non-published work fully belong to the author, who can publish it freely anywhere else. We will properly compensate authors for any commissioned work not published before 1 January.

What are the consequences for De Correspondent and its staff members?

Most importantly we will miss our The Correspondent colleagues, and the perspectives from all over the world that they brought us. There will be no layoffs at De Correspondent related to the discontinuation of The Correspondent. Dutch staff members who worked for The Correspondent part-time will continue working for De Correspondent as of January 1st, 2021.

Could the discontinuation have been prevented?

We explored every alternative scenario we could think of to continue our English language platform, including continuing with a smaller team, proposing salary cuts, and merging The Correspondent with its Dutch sister site, De Correspondent. Unfortunately, none of the scenarios turned out to be financially feasible.

When and how will I get my refund?

Your membership ends on January 1, 2021. We will start refunding you and other members from the first week of 2021 onwards. This will happen automatically, and you don’t have to take any action for this. Please don’t charge back your membership payment, since this will only incur extra costs for The Correspondent.

Two examples of how the refunds are calculated:

1. When you have a yearly membership which renewed on September 30, 2020, your membership will be active up and including 31 December 2020. The remaining time (counted in days) from 1 January 2021 - 29 September 2021 will be automatically refunded to you.
2. When you have a monthly membership which you started on December 7th 2020, your membership will be active up and including 31 December 2020. The remaining time (counted in days) from 1 January 2021 - 6 January 2021 will be automatically refunded to you.

I don’t want a refund. Is that possible too?

That is very kind of you, thank you, but we will refund all our members. If you want to support independent journalism ventures like ours in the future, you can visit the Membership Puzzle Project, a New York University initiative that keeps track of all membership based journalism platforms around the world, for inspiration.

I want to keep supporting you, can I cancel my refund?

Thank you so much for your support. Some members have been discussing ideas around organizing another crowdfunding campaign, how you are willing to pay more, or are offering to waive your rights to a refund. I can’t express how much this means to us.

However, a combination of scenarios means we couldn’t indeed make The Correspondent work. This included:

• The fact that only 27% of founding members renewed their memberships
• The average membership fee dropped
• There was an increase in membership cancellations for members who joined after our launch in late September 2019

These three individual worst-case scenarios came into play simultaneously. Unfortunately, after weeks of exploring solutions and new strategies, we came to the conclusion that none of these were financially feasible. While we hear you when you say we could have included you at this stage of the process, we couldn’t find an opportunity to involve you, our members.

Do you have to discontinue due to Covid-19?

The pandemic plays a significant role, yes. Covid-19 dominated the headlines for the past year, making it difficult to offer "unbreaking news" to members in over 140 countries. People want to know from their media source: "Is my kid’s school going to be closed tomorrow and when will I be eligible for a vaccination?" While essential, this is not the kind of journalism we were set up to do. We were focused instead on transnational issues.

What do the ambassadors of your 2018 crowdfunding campaign think of the discontinuation of The Correspondent?

We have informed our ambassadors via email or phone call about this sad news. We can’t speak on their behalf and we remain very grateful for their support.

Didn’t you have investors?

Yes, The Democracy and Media Foundation and Luminate. We are immensely grateful for the support they have given us, in good times and bad. We applaud their mission to support independent media all over the world and we’re proud to have been part of their impressive network of journalism organisations.

Have you informed the union about the lay-offs?

The Dutch union for journalists was informed on Wednesday 9 December 2020 about the discontinuation of the newsroom. In The Netherlands, the union is the ‘Nederlandse Vereniging voor Journalisten’. We have shared with the union that The Correspondent is stopping for financial reasons.

After refunding the members and paying severance packages to staff members, is there any money left?

Yes, all of the remaining cash will be used to pay our creditors. There is no money going back to the founders of The Correspondent.

What will happen with the website on 1 January 2021?

As of the new year, we will stop publishing new articles. All articles and audio stories published during the existence of The Correspondent will remain publicly accessible. Other than that, the website will remain online for archival reasons.

What happens to the audio app?

Members can still download the audio app until we cease publishing. We will remove it from the Apple and Android app stores on January 1, 2020. The audio journalism will remain accessible on the website.

What will happen to the member comments?

While all articles and audio stories will remain publicly accessible, member comments will not. Member comments were made in the context of a community and have been visible to members only. Since memberships will end on January 1, 2021, these comments will not be accessible any longer.

Will you restart The Correspondent at some point?

We have no plans or intentions of relaunching The Correspondent. We gave it our all, and we didn’t succeed. We have launched several other projects in the past that didn’t succeed and we have also launched new endeavours successfully. Experimenting with new things is part of our DNA and we’ll keep doing so in the future.

What have you learned from this?

We are now completely focused on winding The Correspondent down in a responsible way. It’s too early for us to reflect on the past few years of setting up and running The Correspondent. We will, however, do so in the near future and share our lessons learned.