Ernst Pfauth (1986) is co-founder and CEO of The Correspondent, a journalism platform for “unbreaking news” that successfully crowdfunded $2.6 million from 45,888 backers in November 2018 and will start publishing in September 2019.
The Correspondent started in the Netherlands as ‘De Correspondent’ and has 62,000 paying members there and a fulltime staff of 52 journalists, editors, designers, developers and supporting staff. It has been praised by media such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Fortune and Die Zeit for how it enables readers to share their knowledge with journalists.
At the Dutch news organization De Correspondent, journalists share story ideas with subscribers before they write them, so they can harvest community knowledge.
The New York Times
Read more about Ernst’s ideas for journalism in these four articles he wrote:
- Publishing less to give readers more – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
- Earn trust by working for (and with) readers – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
- Why Subscriptions are the Future of Journalism – Editor & Publisher.
- Readers are only getting started – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
Career
Ernst is obsessed by innovation in media. He is the former Head of Digital at NRC Handelsblad, as well as an acclaimed bestselling author and columnist who has written two books on blogging and one about the burn-out society. In 2008 and 2009, he served as editor in chief of The Next Web Blog, which is now among the ten most-visited blogs of the world.
In his latest book, the Dutch bestseller ‘Dankboek‘ (The Book of Thanks), he makes a case for beating the burn-out society together. He shares some conclusions from his book in his TEDx Talk ‘How we can beat the burnout society‘.
Ernst gave talks at South by Southwest (SxSW), The Next Web Conference, The International Journalism Festival, The Columbia Journalism School and the World Publishers Forum and guest lectures at Harvard’s journalism institute and New York University.
Recognition
In 2016, the American magazine Forbes featured Ernst in their 30 under 30 list for Europe, and the Council for the United States and Italy invited him for their prestigious Young Leaders Conference. He has also won multiple blogging awards in The Netherlands. The Royal Dutch Library archived his personal blog, pfauth.com, because of its cultural and societal significance.
Arts & Culture
Another love of Ernst-Jan is arts and literature. He often hosts literary talkshows, and welcomed writers like Donna Tartt, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ben Lerner, Chad Harbach, and David Sedaris as guests. He hosted talkshows for Frans Hals Museum and The Dutch National Opera & Ballet – interviewing Dutch icons like artist Joep van Lieshout, dancer Igoné de Jongh and choreographer Hans van Manen.