# Republik ***Republik*** is a German-language, reader-funded, ad-free Swiss online magazine based in Zurich, launched in January 2018 and built around long-form investigative journalism. Tracked in the KB as the outlet Palantir unsuccessfully sued — a rare, clean case of a small newsroom beating the surveillance giant in court (see [[Palantir v. Republik (Zurich)]]). ## Ownership and funding model Republik is the journalistic arm of **Project R**, a non-profit cooperative that owns the magazine and into which every paying reader becomes a member. There is no advertising and no billionaire proprietor; the model is deliberately structured so that readers, as cooperative members, have a formal say in editorial-institutional questions (for example, whether to fund a data-journalism team). The launch was one of the most successful media crowdfunding efforts in Europe: a 2017 campaign drew more than 13,000 supporters, and the project raised roughly CHF 3.4M in five weeks and about CHF 7.7M by the time it went live in January 2018. The structure matters to why Palantir's legal pressure failed to intimidate it — there is no advertiser or owner to lean on, and the newsroom's independence is baked into its ownership. ## Editorial profile Republik markets itself on "no-bullshit journalism" and has earned a strong investigative reputation in Switzerland, praised by the Columbia Journalism Review and Harvard's Nieman Lab and experimenting with reader-participation formats — including crowdsourced research where members help gather documents and data from public institutions. That participatory, freedom-of-information-driven method is exactly what produced the Palantir story. ## The Palantir investigation and lawsuit In December 2025, Republik — working with the **WAV research collective** and drawing on dozens of freedom-of-information requests to Swiss federal authorities — published a year-long investigation reporting that, after nearly four years operating in Switzerland, Palantir had repeatedly failed to win Swiss government contracts, and raising data-sovereignty and legal-compliance concerns about its software. Palantir responded not with a defamation suit but by invoking Switzerland's narrow right-of-reply ("Gegendarstellung") mechanism across 23 separate passages. On June 12, 2026, Zurich's Commercial Court rejected 22 of the 23 demands and ordered Palantir to bear 95% of costs — a press-freedom win that fed the wider European backlash indexed under [[Purge Palantir]] and detailed in [[Palantir v. Republik (Zurich)]]. ## See Also - [[Palantir v. Republik (Zurich)]] - [[Palantir]] - [[Purge Palantir]] - [[Palantir Watch Log]]