Attila Mong

Attila Mong is an investigative journalist, board member and deputy editor-in-chief for atlatszo.hu, a crowdfunded Hungarian investigative journalism NGO supported by the Open Society Institute and by Fritt Ord, the Norwegian Civil Fund. The main focus of the NGO is investigating and exposing corruption, anti-corruption campaigning, and advocacy. Mong was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2013. He has a long career of investigative journalism and has been awarded with the major Hungarian investigative journalism prizes, including the Soma and the Pulitzer Memorial Prize.

As a candidate for the new board in GIJN, he says:

We have been building Atlatszo.hu for years now with the aim of creating a sustainable business model around the initiative. Last year has been a breakthrough: we have managed to achieve that goal through a succesful crowdfunding campaign, in which we have built up a stable subscriber base for the NGO. Now we are around 70 percent crowdfunded, the rest of our funding coming from big institutional donors.

Besides our activities in Hungary, our voice is getting stronger and stronger on a European and international level, too. We are often invited to Brussels to different EU meetings to discuss issues of transparency, anti-corruption and of course, journalism.

Leveraging on this latter, as a board member of GIJN, my main goal would be to strengthen the lobbying activities of the organization in the EU and other international organizations to introduce new funding opportunities for investigative journalism startups and initiatives.