The Day We Went to Press
The Axel Springer building in Berlin carries a certain reputation. Media empire, tabloid throne, the address where serious journalists allegedly discover their principles were negotiable all along. Walking in with Caro and Hannah alongside a loose federation of Berlin bloggers, I expected to feel something sinister. We found free schnitzel.
The occasion was a one-off edition of Welt Kompakt—a Scroll Edition created entirely by bloggers, filled and written by people who’d spent their careers communicating in hyperlinks and comment sections rather than column inches. Claudio and Suz from iHeartBerlin were there, plus Rose from Sprachrodeo and Sandra from Gossip Girlz—a room full of people for whom the printed page felt faintly ancestral. Digital Natives, we called ourselves (I owe a coin to the jargon jar).
We watched the German Federal President election play out live on-screen while picking through schnitzel, muffins, and fresh fruit—Club-Mate making the rounds as the official lubricant of the digital intelligentsia—tablets flying around the table, everyone simultaneously writing and second-guessing their angles. You realize pretty fast how different editorial instincts are when you put internet people in a room with a deadline. We agreed on almost nothing. The one unanimous position: everyone had a Mac. Hannah had something with Windows. Nobody held it against her.
By evening we’d migrated to a bar on the Spree, Hannah consoling herself with chicken legs and white wine while the rest of us debriefed on what we’d actually said into the cameras that kept materializing throughout the day. The printed edition hit kiosks the next morning—our names inside, alongside a lot of people sharper than us. Print lands differently when you’ve existed only in pixels for years. There’s a permanence to it that’s either satisfying or vaguely terrifying, depending on what you actually wrote.
One question from the day still hasn’t been answered: who the hell is Carolin Schmitz, and why was everyone saying her name?