(2018-09-14) De Correspondent The Problem With Real News and What We Can Do About It

Rob Wijnberg: The problem with real news — and what we can do about it. ...inspired me to found the Dutch journalism platform De Correspondent in 2013, promising to be “an antidote to the daily news grind” for its readers. So many people responded that we even set a world record in crowdfunding a news site. Today, we’re on the verge of launching The Correspondent, bringing unbreaking news to the United States and beyond.

News is all about sensational, exceptional, negative, and current events.

The news is: one crazy unrelated event after another

The news is: what’s not happening

When you put all this together, it means the news actually fails to deliver on its single biggest promise: to tell us what’s happening in the world

To be clear: when I say “news” I don’t mean “all journalism.”

At De Correspondent in the Netherlands, we try to tell precisely those stories that aren’t news, but news-worthy nevertheless. Or, as we often say, that

asking “What do we have to add to this news that isn’t available anywhere else?” If the answer is “nothing,” then we won’t report on even the most major of news events. That’s why in 2016, on the day of the tragic bombings in Brussels, just 125 miles from our office in Amsterdam, we didn’t publish a word. Instead, we referred our members to the best reporting by other outlets

we’ve also had to train our correspondents to stop thinking in completed stories.

our correspondents share their plans and ideas, and then provide interim updates by keeping a public notebook.

we believe that a hundred readers by definition know more than a single journalist. On our platform these everyday experts share their knowledge and experience with our correspondents

ultimately rooted in an underlying conviction: that by sharing our knowledge and experience with each other, we can leave the world better than we found it. Said another way, De Correspondent is based on a belief in progress.

one of the worst enablers of this waning belief in progress is — you guessed it — the daily news that we consume.