Roughly nine gigabytes of internal data from the German news portal Nius is freely available online, according to an investigation published by the non-profit newsroom Correctiv, which says it sampled and verified the material.

The dataset is unusually revealing for a media outlet. It includes addresses of readers and contact details for about 12,000 subscribers — in many cases full names together with home addresses — and partial credit card numbers for some of them. Politicians at federal and state level as well as business figures appear among the subscribers. The leak also exposes internal editorial material: 21,489 articles and information about people who spoke with the newsroom as sources or interviewees.

Nius chief editor Julian Reichelt confirmed on Wednesday that a leak occurred in May or June, and said the portal would file a criminal complaint against unknown parties. Correctiv says it sent questions to Nius on Monday and rejects Reichelt's claim that the research network failed to warn the outlet or the authorities in time; Correctiv says it deliberately withheld personal data and the real names of Nius authors who write under pseudonyms.

Berlin's data protection commissioner has recorded four incident reports from Nius since June 2025, the most recent arriving last Tuesday. Germany's Verdi union said it knew of no comparable data outflow in the German media landscape. Reporters Without Borders' Christian Mihr warned that people who speak confidentially with a newsroom must be able to rely on their identity being protected, which he called a core duty of media houses. In July 2025, Nius was already hit by a breach that exposed email addresses.

Correctiv says its sample-matching shows the data is authentic. The episode raises hard questions about how well a politically influential publisher protects both the people who read it and the people who talk to it — and about how quickly affected subscribers are told what was taken.

Sources