What happened at the Correspondent? | WARC | The Feed

What happened at the Correspondent?

The Correspondent was the US-based, English language version of the Dutch online publication De Correspondent, whose membership model promised to ‘unbreak’ the news in the US market; but when the US version faltered late last year and eventually shuttered, it left behind valuable lessons about new types of media businesses.

Why it matters

Launched in 2019, at the height of discussion about membership economics as a sustainable model for journalism among other sectors, The Correspondent should have been doing everything right as it exported a working model to the US with the help of an NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. But by January 2021 it was explaining that its financing didn’t work and that it would be offering refunds to members; its founders identify three mistakes.

But it comes at a time of greater complexity, with other facets of membership such as Rosen’s Membership Puzzle Project coming to a close, and with recent Digiday research finding that alternatives to advertising have not been as forthcoming as hoped.

Simply, membership is not a silver bullet, Rosen explained to Nieman Lab. The experience of The Correspondent suggested that pure play membership-funded publications are less effective than those with a mix of revenue streams, including some advertising.

Lessons

• Too much marketing without the goods
  Speaking candidly, co-founder and editor in chief, Rob Wijnberg, explained that the launch campaign into the US had focussed extensively on marketing, and especially on communicating the principles at the heart of the project. While this worked to bring in over $2.5 million of funding to start the project, by not publishing any articles to show people what they were getting ahead of launch, a lot of people soon gave up their memberships as the output didn’t meet expectations. COVID had an outsized impact on the project, too, as members found that the news they needed was about the place they were living in, rather than news with a global outlook. When times got tough, this subscription didn’t matter to people enough.
  
  
• Funding doesn’t equal paying members
  With a model that had worked well in the Netherlands, many sources of funding were forthcoming, but largely because it looked like a good business. Money went to the concept, but not enough effort went into showing what product that concept would produce. “[I]t’s important to speak truth. It’s not that important to speak about truth as part of your brand because when you do that you invite, again, either attacks or criticism”, explained Jay Rosen.
  
  
• Good PR isn’t just about sharing good news
  “My biggest lesson in all that is that you have to be much more proactive in sharing not just your answers but your questions, your dilemmas, your challenges, your thoughts, your mistakes,” explains Rob Wijnberg, lamenting the impulse to appear as if you have all the answers, even as a young organisation.
  
  Ultimately, pretending that the strategy was figured out, especially when some members were surprised to hear that the publication would be operating without a US office, drawing acute criticism. The company needed to apologise early on, rather than being open with members and other elements of the press about the difficulty of setting up a new model.

Sourced from Nieman Lab, WARC, The Correspondent. Image: The Correspondent