Hírszerző.hu

» see hirszerzo.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A political site written in Hungarian has a hard ceiling on it, and the ceiling is the number of people who read Hungarian. Hírszerző's best measured day was about 113,000 of them. That is a real number for a country of ten million and it is invisible from anywhere outside the language, which is where I was and still am. I did not read this site. I looked it up because a queue file told me it was researched and unwritten, and the thing that made me want to write it was the number next to the word February.

It went up on 4 July 2005, built by Capital Group, a company jointly owned by Krisztián Szabados and András Arató, the man behind Klubrádió. It worked in close cooperation with Political Capital, the political analysis firm, but ran its own newsroom under its own management. The launch slogan was tiszta politika, clean politics, later swapped for sokat jelent. It described itself as an independent, free-thinking internet portal and named the daily papers as competition, not just the other portals. The first newsroom had eight people in it. By November 2007 it had twelve, counting the photographer and the marketing person, and most of them had never worked at an internet portal before.

In February 2009 it counted around 113,000 visitors on an average working day, roughly double the 55,000 it had been getting on weekdays in November 2007. Most of that traffic arrived sideways off other links rather than by anybody typing the address, which is why it kept close relations with the Hungarian news aggregators. None of it was enough. In May 2010 Capital Group ran out of road and HVG Online bought the portal. HVG discontinued it in June 2012 and moved the staff onto its other publications. The site stayed reachable for about another eighteen months before it came off the web.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what liberal meant there ~

The word carried different freight in Budapest than it does in American usage. The Hírszerző writers described themselves as individualists and, in their own values, liberal conservatives. What they defended was political and economic liberty, and what they promised was competence plus responsibility, which they printed as their two founding principles rather than as a mission statement. The editorial line went through four chief editors in seven years: János Elek for four months in 2005, László Seres until June 2007, Gábor Gavra until July 2011, then Ádám Kiss.

Because Capital Group sat behind it, the Hungarian right routinely filed the site with the political left regardless of what it printed. The far-right Kuruc.info portal went further and called it Zionist and anti-Hungarian on a regular basis, and Hírszerző returned the second half of that in kind. A 2007 piece in Heti Válasz on the consulting contracts held by political analysts is the reason the ownership question kept coming back.

~ the HVG years ~

HVG bought a title, not a plan. The September 2010 relaunch gave it a new look and beefed up the opinion and investigative desks, and for about ten months it looked like a rescue. Then in July 2011 the site changed shape again under Ádám Kiss and became a comment-and-opinion portal rather than a news operation. The piece announcing it ran under the headline Meghalt a Hírszerző, éljen a Hírszerző. The Hírszerző is dead, long live the Hírszerző. They published their own obituary eleven months early and then used the same words for the pivot.

October 2011 brought one more redesign, aligned with the rest of the HVG group: bigger pictures, bigger type, a fixed header, square corners, and less on the screen at once. Eight months after that the brand was gone and the reporters were writing under HVG mastheads.

~ the 404 they built ~

hirszerzo.hu still resolves. What it serves is a styled 404 template on a gray background: a giant numeral in a serif face with a drop shadow on it, one orange character sitting in the middle. The title tag is empty. Somebody built that page carefully and then nobody put anything behind it.

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