Berliner Gazette (BG) is a nonprofit and nonpartisan team of journalists, researchers, artists, and coders. Since 1999 we have been publishing berlinergazette.de under a Creative Commons License with more than 1,500 contributors. In dialogue with our international network we create annual projects, exploring the issues at hand not only in the form of text series but also conferences and books.
The Berliner Gazette (BG) has been published online since 1999 and has become an experimental platform in dialog with offline formats (workshops, exhibitions, festivals), thriving on exchange with grassroots movements and research initiatives and dissolving the conventional boundary between editors and audience.
Beyond the usual boundaries…
Investigating translocal issues and focusing on annual themes, we explore the possibilities of cultural change through commoning – a practice that combines cooperation, mutuality, and solidarity as a way of prefiguring a better world beyond the constraints and injustices of a profit-driven society.
We are cooperating with people who, without resigning themselves to their own powerlessness, reflect critically on adverse conditions and thus raise their voices: with academics, activists, and artists; with experienced writers and with those who are making their first attempts at writing and who – until now – may have been primarily ‘only’ readers of BG.
…doing Feuilleton together In this way, we explore practices of commoning and forms of collective struggle and make this knowledge accessible to a broad public. In doing so, we focus on what is relevant in the long term. What blossoms online in the Feuilleton continues offline: We organize conferences, festivals, exhibitions, and seminars in the spirit of a comprehensive cultural and political education.
Our projects are realized in cooperation with partners. These can be schools, cultural institutions or informal networks. We see each location as an ‘extended editorial headquarters.’ From there, ideas and content flow back into our Internet newspaper. Sometimes even into our books.
Performance, “More World” conference, 2019
In this way, we continue to expand the boundaries of publishing. What emerges is creative commons. Consequently, we release all the content of our networked newspaper for public reuse under a Creative Commons license. Our team, spread across several cities, works on the Internet newspaper on a volunteer basis. We do not make any money from the content and (online) publishing in general. Instead, we are testing models of funding for projects such as conferences, festivals, and exhibitions.
Our projects include “Black Box East” (2021), “Silent Works” (2020), “More World” (2019), and “Signals” (2017). Our books include “Invisible Hand(s)” (2020) and “A Field Guide to the Snowden Files” (2017). On behalf of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, we curated the international conference “As Darkness Falls” (2014).
