We’ve been writing a lot lately about online journalism startups like Matter — which was acquired by Medium and just dropped its paywall — and NSFW Corp., the Vegas-based venture that just merged with Pando Daily. Both have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and gotten a fair amount of attention, even though they have both failed to remain independent.
But there is an online media startup that is substantially larger than Matter and NSFW put together, both in terms of funding raised and in number of subscribers — and yet it gets surprisingly little attention. That’s because this particular crowdfunding success story is based in Holland. Known as De Correspondent, itlaunched in September, having raised a relatively massive $1.7 million in donations from almost 19,000 people.
In a post on Medium, the publisher of De Correspondent described the campaign, and what the venture has done since its official launch. According to Ernst-Jan Pfauth, the money raised allowed the company to hire a design firm (which became a partner in the venture) and to develop its own content-management system from scratch — a system called Respondens — which is designed to allow writers and editors to post multiple kinds of content, and also to create their own online community to engage with readers.