PARIS — With the words that follow, the team at Worldcrunch bids au revoir to you, our loyal readers and anyone else who may have stumbled upon our work over these past 15 years. We send our sincere gratitude to the investors and news industry partners who have believed in our work, and to the dozens of current and former colleagues who helped deliver it. Whew!
We began and end publishing on this site with the same core mission to deliver to an English-speaking audience the best journalism from every corner and language of the planet.
With the new means of digital connection, we knew from the start that selecting, translating and adapting stories from different languages was a cost-and-time-efficient way to bring the highest quality journalism to a wider audience. But the choice to break down the language barrier for top international news sources and journalists was ultimately not a business or technical endeavor: it was the expression of our belief that we’re all better off if the stories and voices in our lives come from everywhere.
We evolved and expanded over the years, with pieces produced by our own international network of journalists. We delivered newsletters, dove into video and podcast production, always aiming to explore new ways to tell stories online without ever compromising the highest journalistic standards.
It took a bit of hustle to make the business sustainable over the years for a news media that neither yelled nor pandered, nor specialized in any single sector or location. Alongside our daily journalism, we launched innovation projects and editorial services for clients, some of which carry on.
Yet recently, we’ve understood that it’s no longer economically viable to deliver the quality and frequency of work that readers have come to expect from our newsroom. And so, as of today, we will no longer be publishing new stories on Worldcrunch.com. Our archives will remain online, free of charge.
At the start of this piece, anyone who knows a bit of French might have noticed that we chose to bid au revoir rather than adieu. “Until next time,” not farewell. Our hope is that the work we’ve done as a global digital media, including our mistakes, can offer some guidance for others who believe the future will be better the more the world’s best stories can travel.
Back when we launched, it was becoming clear that information would be predominantly produced and consumed digitally. Today, some believe it’s now going to happen artificially. Our particular experience with the translation of news, where the tools have been in use for years, may hold lessons for others about the promise and limits of AI. Still, no person or machine can change the basic fact that stories, reliable information and language itself must and will remain the tools that set humans apart.
So now to close, we humans of Worldcrunch must search among our languages for a final word to say goodbye. Adiós? Auf Wiedersehen? Sayōnara? We’ve settled instead on a friendly little word that’s been adopted over time by half the world. In Italy, newspapers reserve it for headlines that announce the passing of a beloved public figure. It’s informal and flexible, said in sadness and with joy. For our purposes, it can mean both farewell and until next time. And with a little punctuation, it’s also the perfect way to say: hey, nice to meet you… Ciao!
Jeff Israely
Editor & co-founder
