Ink on Dead Trees

The people at Burda sat us down at a long table with bowls of snacks and bottles of expensive mineral water and told us, with the kind of practiced seriousness that publishing executives reserve for big announcements, that they wanted to fill a publication gap. One that didn’t technically exist yet. That’s the kind of ambition I can respect.

What they wanted was to turn this journal into a physical magazine. Print. Paper you fold and hold and leave on a bathroom counter. I sat there for a few seconds not knowing what to do with that information, and then I was completely in.

The name got trimmed to A&P—short enough to fit on a cover without crowding out everything else a newsstand magazine is obligated to scream at you. The subjects stay the same: music, life, sex, art, Pokémon. Just bigger, with more room to run. A small group of international correspondents along for the ride.

There’s something print demands that a website never quite does. A post can be edited at 3am, quietly walked back, disappeared. A magazine sits on a shelf and petrifies. The mistakes stay. So do the things that worked. I found that genuinely frightening and couldn’t wait.

The bilingual test issue went out in May—limited run, €3.50, newsstands in Germany and Austria. Whether anyone would pay for a physical version of something they’d been reading for free felt like a real question with a real answer waiting somewhere on the other side of it.