Sources

The Hungarian online magazine Abcúg (Alphabet) was founded in 2014 by journalists from Origo.hu magazine who, after the dismissal of Origo editor-in-chief Gergő Sáling, were forced to leave this platform because they had reported too critically about the government. On Abcúg they had the opportunity to write openly and unhindered about what was going on in the country. Abcúg was financed by the Real Reporting Foundation of the American real estate investor Richard Field, who is active in Hungary and who in interviews called his involvement an “investment in Hungarian democracy”. Abcúg brought reports from the most remote and poorest corners of the country and reported on the difficult life of the people living there. The editorial team saw it as their mission to talk about people and social groups which were badly represented in the Hungarian press and never addressed directly: broken families, the segregation of Roma children in school, the problems of people with mobility disabilities with no access to work or housing, etc. Abcúg has helped raise the volume of social issues in other Hungarian media and to produce more articles about disadvantaged people and groups. It presented experts and people from civil society who have something to say about the social division in Hungary, poverty and social inequality. The magazine was discontinued in 2019.