About four months ago, the U.S. media world was told that a new player was coming to town. The project piggybacked off a Netherlands-based news site called de Correspondent (the new version bears the unoriginal but aptly translated name: The Correspondent). It was the perfect talking point for journalists and pundits who are prone to, in the same tweet, bemoan the rise of Trump, fake news, and social media while lamenting the demise of “discourse.”

The Correspondent, we were told, would be different. It was founded on principles (principles!) like telling the whole story and building trust (trust!) with readers. The PR blitz name-dropped a bunch of big-ish personalities–including NYU professor Jay Rosen and comedian Baratunde Thurston–who expressed their support for the project via tweets and Medium posts. Rosen himself wrote nearly 3,000 words about what’s failing American media and what initiatives like The Correspondent can do to help. To bring the new platform to the U.S., all people had to do was contribute to its crowdfunding campaign. After 30 days, it exceeded its goal of $2.5 million, meaning it was primed to launch this new platform.

Since then, The Correspondent has announced its plans to launch its new newsroom later this year. But last night, it disclosed that the new English language headquarters would be in Amsterdam, not in New York–which is where the company headed up its U.S. crowdfunding campaign. This development surprised many:

I’ll say it coz no one else will: everything about TheCorrespondent’s so-called U.S. expansion plans for last two years felt like a huckster’s dream, everyone shilling for them have some explanation to do. Or not, coz really, no one should’ve given a shit in the first place. — Rafat Ali, Media Operator (@rafat) March 26, 2019

The original pitch seemed to be that the news site was expanding and coming to the U.S.–and that goal helped it raise millions of dollars from Americans. Now, the company is saying the plan is actually to launch an English-language platform based in Europe, and that it never disclosed where the headquarters would be. Essentially, The Correspondent said this is a misunderstanding due to the poor reading comprehension of Americans.

That’s, however, not quite true. While, yes, some of the press releases did mention the English language platforms, others contained inferences of a U.S. launch. Indeed, The Correspondent’s CEO, Ernst Pfauth, emailed my colleague about the project last October and clearly described it as the organization “launching in the U.S.” The subsequent coverage described it thus too. “If it raises the money, it will launch in the U.S. next spring,” wrote TechCrunch. “A Dutch news startup has crowdfunded more than $1 million for a U.S. version of its reader-driven news model,” wrote NBC News.

Now, the company’s leadership seems to have changed its story, claiming that early on it considered a New York newsroom, but that during the actual launch it never made such promises:

Our intention was always to have correspondents based all over the world: https://t.co/IEcsfsLP62 There were times we thought we needed a NYC newsroom to support that (mid’18),but we didn’t mention that in the campaign and now realize it’s better to focus supporting staff in AMS — Ernst Pfauth (@ejpfauth) March 26, 2019

Still, the organization never corrected any of the reporting that described the launch as U.S.-based.