Addendum

» see addendum.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Addendum published in German, about Austria, for three years I spent entirely elsewhere. Everything below is assembled out of the record, and for once the record is close to complete, because what killed the place was announced in a statement and written up the same afternoon by every media desk in the country.

It was founded on 25 September 2017 and based in Salzburg. Michael Fleischhacker was publisher and managing director, working alongside Niko Alm, a former NEOS politician, with Stefan Kaltenbrunner and Lucia Marjanović among the editors. The money came from Quo Vadis Veritas, a non-profit foundation set up by Dietrich Mateschitz, who owned Red Bull.

There was no daily news cycle. A team would spend weeks on a single subject and publish the finished thing free, with the underlying data sitting beside it. Fifty-seven people on staff is a serious newsroom for a country of nine million, and the whole of it was pointed at a handful of stories at a time.

On 4 August 2020 the foundation announced that Mateschitz and Fleischhacker had reached a mutual decision to wind up both the foundation and the platform. The stated reason was that despite considerable financial investment and a number of successful and relevant research projects, the foundation's aims had not been met to a sufficient degree. Mateschitz wanted to move toward solution-oriented projects, away from everyday political argument. Operations ran to the end of September and all 57 employees were registered for dismissal with the Austrian employment service.

~ the record ~

~ the problem with the money ~

An investigative outlet financed by exactly one billionaire carries an obvious objection, and Addendum carried it from its first day to its last. The Red Bull connection opened almost every article written about the place, this one included, and no amount of good work was ever going to make that stop being the first fact anybody reached for.

The counter-argument was the output, which had no advertiser to please and no proprietor's newspaper to stay consistent with. Whichever way you came down on that, the structure proved itself in how the thing ended. One person decided, the staff found out when the press did, and there was no subscriber base to be disappointed because there had never been one.

~ what is still readable ~

The Internet Archive crawled addendum.org hard when the news broke. More than 250 captures of the front page landed in August 2020, the bulk of them on the 4th, in bursts a few minutes apart through the evening. Volunteers were saving the place by hand that evening.

In the event it had longer than that. The front page kept serving a full 60-kilobyte index of the back catalog through 2021 and into 2022, long after the last person had been paid. Today addendum.org answers HTTP 404, and even the error page still carries the house furniture and the old tagline in its title: das, was fehlt, meaning the thing that is missing.

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