Cultivating calm
on a global stage
Crowdfunding: De Correspondent has raised $2.6 million for
its international expansion. The crowdfunding campaign wasdesigned by Momkai, under the direction of Harald Dunnink.
For Dunnink, it was the moonshot he’d dreamed of for so long.

"My mind works like a child's," says designer Harald Dunnink as he walks
through Brooklyn, looking for the L train to The Correspondent's office inManhattan. "I draw little rockets on everything, like those red-and-whitecheckered ones in the Adventures of Tintin." Indeed, the quest to take theDutch journalism platform De Correspondent global in New York feels
much like a mission to the moon, and a childhood dream come true.
Dunnink (37) is the founder and creative director of Momkai, anAmsterdam design studio specializing in digital design. The company isalso one of the driving forces behind De Correspondent, which he and his
partner at Momkai, Sebastian Kersten, helped to found. In 2013 Momkai
handled De Correspondent's crowdfunding campaign and launch in theNetherlands. In these final months of 2018 he's in New York to repeat thefeat, but this time "at the Olympic level." In the already crowded
English-language market.

The Correspondent will ultimately reach its goal of $2.5 million in
mid-December, but on this cold Friday in November when Dunnink
finally locates the entrance to the L train, the campaign has just begun.
He's barely slept and while we talk he's busy sending a steady stream oftext messages to his team in Holland, where it's already evening. Then heputs his phone away. "Did you know that there were not two, but three
astronauts aboard the Apollo 11?"
Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. But the third one? Dunnink isacutely aware of his name—and also a little of what he felt. "MichaelCollins. He stayed behind in the capsule. No one's heard of him." AtDe Correspondent, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth are the two men
out walking on the moon. Dunnink is back in the capsule. With pleasure,he says; he chose the role himself. "My work is service-oriented. I build astage to shine the brightest possible light on the key players: our stories,and Rob."

Cultivating Calm
Right from his very first meeting with Wijnberg in 2013, Dunnink decided
that Momkai would support this uncertain initiative. He was infected by
Wijnberg's daring, his critique of the media, and his ambition to use
journalism to draw people into conversation with each other.
Dunnink and Wijnberg came up with the name "De Correspondent"
together. The elegant logo is Dunnink's handwriting; the distinctive
hand-drawn employee portraits come from his studio. His hawk-like gazewatches over the site's precise colors, typography, and styling. In 2013
Momkai was working for major brands such as Nike, Red Bull, andBugaboo, but in the intervening years the studio has come to increasinglyidentify with De Correspondent.

Since August 2018 Momkai (roughly 30 FTEs) and De Correspondent(roughly 50 FTEs) have shared a building in Amsterdam, as if tounderscore the fact that the two companies are effectively one. In ourmoon-mission analogy, Dunnink's partner Kersten is at ground control in
Houston: De Correspondent's office in Amsterdam, where he strives tobring order to the company's mildly chaotic finances.
That's been Momkai's role from the start, Dunnink says: to cultivate calm
at De Correspondent. Internally, at first: Momkai imposed structure on a
rapidly growing company whose journalists lacked business experience.
The quest for calm is more clearly visible in the design. De
Correspondent's homepage is restful to the eye, certainly compared to theaverage news site from five years ago.
Dunnink and Kersten came up with the idea of using sidenotes andinfocards for the site's articles: putting extra information in separatelinks so it doesn't distract from the main story. Three years later in 2016,
when he was asked to create a personal audio tour for Amsterdam's
Stedelijk Museum, he called his design philosophy for the digital world"Cultivating Calm."

Beating the Drums
All that is in strong contrast with his mission in New York. There,
Dunnink must strive to make The Correspondent a household name. Andso, during the crowdfunding campaign, The Correspondent's social
media accounts issue missives to the beat of a fast drum. Some of them
are self-congratulatory—see how we're transforming journalism—andsome criticize the media in ways that feel alarmist rather than calm.
Wijnberg's claims during the campaign—that "the news" is bad for ourhealth and that it helps autocratic leaders into the saddle—rub his fellow
journalists the wrong way.

The oddity of running a campaign with the hashtag #unbreakingnews
while trying to become breaking news yourself is not lost on Dunnink.
"It's not bad to advertise yourself. That's part of running a campaign.
We're promoting the content."
Amid the clamor for attention, the visuals must express that calm. Andso, during the runup to the campaign, he created a booklet that explains
The Correspondent's ten founding principles. Wijnberg and Pfauth used itas a calling card in the US. The booklet is dark blue with red letters andstitched with red thread; it's shaped like a passport. "I wanted to design
something that you always have with you. Rob wears a suit jacket, andthat shape always fits in his pocket. And you really are giving people
something valuable: our principles."At that time, the two Dutchmen needed to find as many ambassadors as
they could for the international expansion: famous Americans who could
convince their fans and followers to join. Dunnink's passport wasintended to create trust. "The red and blue are a subtle nod to theAmerican color scheme; that makes it feel less foreign to them." Whether
that was the reason or not, The Correspondent ultimately gained thesupport of prominent Americans such as pollster Nate Silver, Black Lives
Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, and other activists, filmmakers,comedians, and digital entrepreneurs.

Fly Me to the Moon
In New York Dunnink has teamed up with Blue State Digital, thecampaign agency that handled Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012
campaigns, among others. In a large meeting room on the twelfth floor,
one giant monitor displays Dunnink and Wijnberg's presentation; on theother, two employees in Washington follow along. After the meeting,managing director Andrew Paryzer seems impressed by what he's seen.

"Normally we're the ones giving presentations like these. This is one of
the best designed campaign decks I've ever seen."
Dunnink is a stickler about those things. The presentation lists theprecise color codes for the blue and red in De Correspondent's house style.
He can't resist noting that the renowned campaign agency's projector wasjust a little bit off in displaying the colors.
Dunnink prefers not to delegate such matters. That's why he was alsofrequently on the road during the campaign, shooting video and photos
for The Correspondent's social media accounts. Including during what
would turn out to be the crowdfunding campaign's most crucial moment.
After De Correspondent's Dutch members got the campaign off to arunning start in its first few days, the counter inched forward at a snail's
pace. Dunnink, Pfauth, and Wijnberg just couldn't manage to reach themassive American public. But with just eight days to go and the counterbarely topping $1 million, their key ambassador, media professor
Jay Rosen, snagged the chance to talk about The Correspondent on
The Daily Show.
Dunnink filmed Wijnberg and Pfauth backstage as they watched theshow on a monitor—it would make a good Instagram post, after. The menlistened, excited and nervous as cats, while Rosen promoted theirjournalism initiative. And then suddenly Dunnink saw Wijnberg andPfauth turn around and look directly into his lens. What had Rosen justsaid to millions of Americans? "If you don't have ads, you don't need daily
traffic quotas. […] And you can cultivate a kind of calm in your news sitethat differs from the rest of the web." Cultivating calm. The third
astronaut back in the capsule has gotten a nod after all.

When the campaign closed in mid-December with more than $2.6 million
and 45,888 members, Dunnink sent everyone in his network "greetingsfrom space," embellished with a tiny astronaut and rocket. He signs off
his regular newsletter with "To infinity and beyond!"
The Correspondent's founders are now back in Holland to work out thedetails of the next step: setting up an international journalism company.
Dunnink sees two major design challenges: both the site and theorganization must be overhauled. "We need to create a new international
theater where I can highlight the key players. There's not really a good
example of an online journalism platform that's done it this way before."
He sometimes discusses these challenges with one of TheCorrespondent's ambassadors: Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia's founder sent
him a personal e-mail in 2017. He wanted to know more about the way
De Correspondent uses its members' experience. "It was one of the most
extraordinary e-mails I've ever received." The two are still in regularcontact. It was one of the moments when Dunnink's enjoyed playing in
the Olympics of digital business.

Research for this article was made possible in part by Fonds 1877 and Fonds
Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten. Leendert van der Valk has been following
De Correspondent's international campaign for a book that will be publishedthis year.

Joost Hölscher

Harald Dunnink (front) was a key creative force behind De Correspondent’s
crowdfunding campaign, alongside Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth (center)