City University students Carolina Are and Charles-Édouard van de Put launched a Kickstarter project to fund The Charta, a slow news website which will bring you stories two weeks after they happened. The project, which went live on March 25th, is asking for £325,000 to give the public ‘an alternative to breaking news’.
Co-founder and editor Carolina, who is also the previous editor of Her Campus City London, said: “What we will try to give you is a tool to make sense of what’s going on in the world, two weeks later.” The Charta believes that the space of two weeks before publishing the story will allow for enough time to analyse stories and bring about accurate, well-researched and original articles while still remaining relevant and timely.
With everyone competing on the same level of getting the story out first, this journalistic venture claims that journalism today is too fast to be good. It then offers the solution of complementing daily news coming from the conventional media outlets. “We still need breaking news for crises and emergencies, but we come in only once the events have settled,” said Carolina.
“On The Charta you won’t see the latest news developments taken out of context and stripped out of their meaning. On the contrary: you will see a clear, open-minded distinction between opinion and fact,” she added. The Charta also promises not to forget about significant issues, stories and events by featuring timelines for long running events to deliver consistent and relevant reporting.
If The Charta comes out successful on reaching its target amount, the website will then be fully pay-walled for ad-free and uninterrupted reading experience. It will be relying on the £75 per year subscription fee of individual readers amounting to £6.25 per month – less than half the average subscription for paid online news outlets.
Inspired by the Dutch online journalism website, De Correspondent, which raised a crowd-funding world record in journalism of $1.7m in just three weeks, the two founders are hopeful about their idealistic project. Charles-Édouard van de Put says: “We are aware this is an ambitious project, but crowd-funding allows to verify our idea and get a solid reader base. If the Dutch De Correspondent can raise 1.7m, why can’t we?”