Creator Rob Wijnberg told The Editor's Weblog he originally thought De Correspondent had a 50 percent chance of meeting its goal of 15,000 members. But as of Thursday, more than 17,000 people have shelled out €60 for an annual subscription to the news site, set to launch in September. According to the site, 48 members have additionally donated €1,000 or more to fund the project.

“We were overwhelmed, especially by how fast it was and especially by how much enthusiasm people showed for the initiative,” Wijnberg said. “People really mailed us lots of letters and tweets and everything saying that ‘I’m so glad you started this.’ We didn’t expect that.”

While this sort of drive is unusual, it is not unprecedented. Several years ago Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano similarly preemptively fundraised, and collected €5 million from 30,000 advance subscribers in 3 months.

De Correspondent has been in the works since Wijnberg quit his job as editor of Dutch national newspaper NRC Next in September. He said he noticed how people are “hounded by news” — often “struck by the same news from all different directions.”

After 80 years in print, the venerable US magazine Newsweek will adopt an entirely digital format from the beginning of 2013, publishing its final print edition on December 31. In an announcement this morning, posted on the website of partner site The Daily Beast, Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown explained:

‘In our judgment, we have reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format. This was not the case just two years ago. It will increasingly be the case in years ahead.’

According to Newsweek’s most recent publishers statement filed with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, print circulation of the magazine has dropped 51 percent since 2007. Such a decline contrasts with the relative success of its online component, again highlighted in Brown’s statement:

‘The Daily Beast now attracts more than 15 million unique visitors a month, a 70 percent increase in the past year alone – a healthy portion of this traffic generated each week by Newsweek’s strong original journalism’.

The new digital publication will be called Newsweek Global and will be supported by a paid subscription model. The Daily Beast will remain a separate site.

International news translation platform Worldcrunch plans to expand its aggregation efforts in a big way—by enlisting the help of its contributors in finding “crunch" worthy articles from around the world, Nieman Journalism Lab reported.

Founded last year by Jeff Israely and Irène Toporkoff in Paris, Worldcrunch translates 20-30 articles per week written by its international news partners, which include French daily newspaper Le Monde and German daily Die Welt, as we previously reported. The articles, chosen by Worldcrunch’s team of journalists and covering topics such as politics to entertainment, are meant to provide English readers with broader perspectives of international affairs, as well as highlighting the viewpoints of citizens from the countries in question.

Worldcrunch has been touted as an appealing option in the face of reductions in foreign news coverage, as we previously reported. And the trend seems to extend past English-speaking readership: French weekly magazine Courrier International and Italian weekly Internazionale provide similar services for French and Italian readers, respectively.