The project was co-founded by Dutch journalist Rob Wijnberg, creative director Harald Dunnink, CTO Sebastian Kersten, and publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth. Wijnberg, former
editor-in-chief of the Dutch newspaper
NRC Next, proposed the crowdfunding idea for an ad-free news media platform on national television in March 2013. Eight days later, he and his team reached their goal of 15,000 subscribers all paying €60 for a one-year membership. Wijnberg worked with digital creative agency Momkai and its owners, Harald Dunnink and Sebastian Kersten, served as creative director and CTO respectively. Ernst-Jan Pfauth, who had been the founding editor of The Next Web and head of digital at Dutch newspaper
NRC Handelsblad, joined as a publisher. The website went live in September 2013. By January 2015 the website had more than 45,000 paying subscribers. In January 2016 the number of paying subscribers on the website was reported to be 50,000. In 2014,
De Correspondent concluded a deal with
Medium’s magazine
Matter, for the magazine to translate stories from
De Correspondent that they believe are relevant for an international audience. The first article in the partnership concerned the hazards of using
public Wi-Fi. In 2015,
De Correspondent started translating stories from Dutch to English. In December 2018, an English-language
newsroom,
The Correspondent, reached its
crowdfunding goal of . The crowdfunding was enabled by a US$1.8 million "runway funding" by grants and loans from the
Omidyar Network, the Dutch Democracy and Media Foundation, and
Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Its first news stories were published in September 2019. as well as readers' demand for more immediate news in light of the
COVID-19 pandemic that ran contrary to the outlet's concept of "unbreaking news". In February 2026, the entire editorial board, consisting of the editor-in-chief and the two deputy editors, announced that they would be stepping down in order to have more time to write articles. ==Content==