new model journalism
Hot Doc
Country: Greece Launched: 2012 Description: Twice-monthly print magazine and website Aims: “To highlight the big issues and analyse them through in-depth investigation, with no cover-ups” Funding: Subscriber only The crisis in Greece has thrown into sharp relief the
challenge of creating independent, financially sustainable media in a country where the business elite has traditionally controlled much news coverage. Broadcast journalist and former war correspondent Costas
Vaxevanis made his name as chief reporter for Pandora’s Box, an investigative television programme. He launched Hot Doc magazine in April 2012 because, he told the Financial Times, he was fed up with constraints imposed by bosses worried that his reporting would anger influential politicians and their business cronies. Hot Doc made headlines in October that same year when
it was handed a flash memory stick with details of 2,000 wealthy Greeks who had secret HSBC bank accounts in Switzerland, enabling them to avoid tax at a time when ordinary Greeks were being asked to accept crippling austerity measures. The issue sold 100,000 copies – four times the normal print run. The Greek government tried to jail him and close the
magazine, but after international outcry the case was dropped. In 2014 the magazine’s own investigation helped to jail six men who had plotted to kill Vaxevanis. Hot Doc has also revealed bribes for weapons contracts
taken by a former defence minister, the links between powerful politicians and the banks, and the central bank’s involvement in facilitating speculation on Greek debt at the start of the crisis. An annual subscription to the magazine is €39.
De Correspondent D
Country: Netherlands Launched: 2013 Description: Interactive digital platform Aims: “To uncover, explain and highlight deep-lying structures and long-term developments that powerfully shape our world, rather than reporting on the latest hype, scare or breaking news story” Funding: Subscriber only, but subscribers can share articles for free The approach by this fast-growing digital outlet is simple.
“The business model has been the same for ever – you think of something that has value, you ask people to give you money for it. If they do, you have a model,” Rob Wijnberg, co-founder and editor, told the Logan Symposium in Berlin in March. “De Correspondent was founded on the basis that we had to do something to challenge the core product, aka ‘the news’. We try to be an antidote to the daily news grind,” he said. It now has an editorial staff of 30, including 14 full-time journalists, plus a network of 22 contributing correspondents.
end up getting to know how the world doesn’t work, you don’t ge
So why do people need an antidote to the news? The news is basically the same everywhere, and it has the same flaws, Wijnberg says. “It is almost always about exceptions, so you e
is
get to understand what is going on – just the exceptions.” News is also about what has gone wrong – one of
journalism’s blind spots is about how the world gets better every day, he says. De Correspondent therefore deals with the fundamental, rather than the sensational, in a way that is in depth rather than superficial.
“It is ad free, no native ads, no advertorials, nothing. to giv and
Charging people for your product is enough,” Wijnberg says. De Correspondent puts a lot of time and effort into “the people formerly known as the audience” – the conversations it it has with readers. “We are trying to get from a publication to a platform where journalists act as conversation leaders, ving a role to people in a network that shares knowledge d expertise,” Wijnberg says.
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16 | theJournalist
NIC DUNLOP/PANOS
GEORGIOS MAKKAS/PANOS
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