Happy second birthday, Telex!

We didn't give up, we didn't hesitate, we didn't stay quiet. We kept writing, filming, photographing, improving. We organised, reorganised, and we restructured. We hoped, we fretted, we cheered. Then we went live, and we've been developing, improving, adding to it and loving it day and night ever since. We were surprised, we couldn't believe it, and we rejoiced. Telex was launched two years ago.

We immediately started by reporting from the protests in Minsk – and even now, we are reporting from Ukraine. We started several new columns, including Észkombájn, Telextárca, Telexikon, Telex Magyarázó, Telex Complex, Telex English, Fact-check, Helyesírási kvíz, Gasztró, Zacc. Clickbait, live election broadcasts, film screenings. We now have an App, we are on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter (@Telexhu). We have a Telex Shop, Telex books, we spent a day meeting our readers at Ördögkatlan Fesztivál, and we have an internship programme.

We regularly cooperate with Direkt36, Investigate Europe, Transitions Online, Euractiv, Deutsche Welle, Szemlélek. We have correspondents in Győr, Szeged, and Pécs. We helped launch Transtelex for Hungarian readers in Transylvania.

We have been recipients of the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Prize, #AllForJan, the György Konrád Award, The Hungarian Press Award, the Quality Journalism Award, the Hungarian Press Photography Award and the Hégető Honorka Prize.

It's really not meant to be a cliché, but it's hard to list all the things that have happened to Telex in the last two years.

As we celebrate our second birthday, we'd like to start by giving our loyal and, thankfully, growing number of readers something new to look forward to. A few days ago, we launched our hiking column, Szépkilátás. Through these articles, our readers can contribute to planting trees, and our most recent collection of short stories written by contemporary Hungarian authors ("A félig olvasott könyv") has just been published. We will soon be providing a range of newsletters to our Hungarian readers, including personalised ones, our app will be updated and the Christmas collection for our webshop is already in the pipeline. And our podcasts are coming soon as well!

To do all this, we continue to rely on the steadfast and continuing love and encouragement of our readers, and the continued generous donations of our supporters. Without it, we would not be here, Telex would not exist.

In the two years we have been in operation, more than 50,000 people have given of their financial resources, and thousands of people have supported us month after month as a show of their trust. It's mainly thanks to these supporters that such a large amount and quality content is available free of charge to such a wide readership of 2.7 million people every month. We cannot thank you enough!

Our goal for the future is to continue to attract new readers and supporters to join our existing readers and supporters. After all, Telex is costly to run, and this can be clearly seen in our transparency reports published every six months.

At the moment, 2400 HUF is enough to run Telex for about a minute, and our goal is to get supporters for every minute of every month and every day!

That is why we are asking for your continued trust and support on our birthday.

We rejoice over each new reader, and are thankful to all existing and new supporters! This has been the case for two years now, and we sincerely hope it will be for many more.