About us · 60 words

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.

Workshop processes, “Friendly Fire” conference, 2017

About us · 350 words

The Berliner Gazette (BG) has been published online since 1999. The experimental platform thrives on dialog with offline formats, and on exchange with grassroots movements and research initiatives. In the course of this, the conventional boundary between editorial office and audience is dissolved.

Beyond the usual boundaries…
We are interested in issues, not news. And since 2002, we have focused on annual themes. In English and German. We examine the relationships of power, domination and exploitation in capitalism and the various crises, inequalities and injustices that this profit-driven economic system has caused in our societies.

Here, we work with people who are willing to reflect critically on adverse circumstances, without resigning themselves to their own powerlessness, and who therefore raise their voices: with academics, activists, and artists; with experienced writers and with those who are making their first attempts at writing and who – up to now – may have been primarily “only” readers of BG.

…doing Feuilleton together
In this way, we explore practices of solidarity-based cooperation 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 with cooperation partners. These can be schools, cultural institutions or informal networks. We understand the respective venue 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).