Index.hu Zrt’s former staff starts collecting donations for a new site called ‘Telex.hu’

The current situation in Hungarian media does not only affect journalists and newsrooms but also readers who have fewer and fewer independent sources to get their news from. A media landscape where independent voices are constantly losing ground weakens democracy. In a functioning democracy, people have a right to access the information needed to be able to make informed decisions.

This is why we came up with an ambitious plan to create a new, entirely independent news site where we can report the facts and readers get to make up their own minds.

The launch of Telex is a large-scale project, and we are well aware that it stands without precedent: Nobody in Hungary had ever tried to build such a large news site from the ground up. But this is the moment to create something that is unique and can become a definitive news source reaching a wide audience, this is the moment to give readers back what they miss.

For this new project, we want to recruit as many of our former colleagues as we possibly can. We want this team, these people, most of whom our readers recognise by name, who maintained, wrote, photographed, recorded, edited what was Hungary’s most popular independent website.

This team is able to start over and innovate. They have what it takes to turn Telex into an unbiased, informative, diverse, and truly independent news source that is neither in opposition nor on the government’s side, but merely brings you the news from a critical, curious, and entertaining perspective, and offers a wide range of content to read and watch. And we want to bring along enough of our old colleagues so we wouldn’t have to compromise on which news to cover, and that means a lot of people. But to get our site off the ground and help stay it afloat, we need support from our readers. Telex only depends on them, on you.

Maintaining something that big is not cheap. It can cost tens of thousands of Euros per month. Our main cost elements will be renting an office, buying equipment to work on and other things such as photo and news agency subscriptions, paying the salaries of our journalists, editors and back-office colleagues, and setting up the technical background needed to securely operate a news site that informs a significant portion of Hungary’s population every day. These components are all necessary to make sure Telex can report on all domestic and global affairs worth covering.

The donation campaign we are starting now asks for help from our readers to launch Telex. But we will not make it a secret, this is not the last time we would turn to our readers for financial support, and in the long-term, we aim to turn our supporters into subscribers who know full well what to expect for their subscriptions.

Telex will be published by Van Másik Kft., a company founded by Márton Kárpáti. The editor-in-chief will be one of Index.hu’s former deputy editor-in-chiefs, Veronika Munk. She will tell you all the details in this video:

Veronika Munk had worked at Index.hu Zrt. from 2002 until 2020. She also teaches journalism at Eötvös Loránd University.

Márton Kárpáti had been a deputy editor-in-chief of www.index.hu for the past seven years, and earlier he had been the head of the politics desk, and between the two, he was the leading editor of TV2’s morning program.