What Ze.tt Wants to Be
There’s this Saturday morning ritual with die ZEIT—the German weekly where you’re supposed to kick out whoever you brought home Friday night, make good coffee, get a warm roll with light ham, cross your legs on the balcony in the sun, and read with complete focus. No phone. Peak civilization. It’s aspirational stuff.
Ze.tt launched today. ZEIT’s new property for young people too cool for weeklies but too smart for RTL2. The editor promised it would generate conversation material
—the kind of stuff you’d argue about in a shared apartment kitchen or link to in group chats.
The problem is the team clearly hasn’t decided what it wants to be. Is it long-form about young love, like NEON? Stupid lists, like BuzzFeed? Clickbait, like Heftig? Or actual journalism?
Right now it looks like a high school newspaper went online. Narrow topic blocks instead of photography. Pixelated screenshots. Obnoxious share buttons. Nothing of ZEIT’s supposed visual sophistication—just elements scattered and crude.
Orange on gray as the primary color. Whoever made that choice should actually be ashamed. Embedded Instagrams bleeding into warped GIFs bleeding into badly cropped screens. It might work on a Heftig audience, but not on anyone who can construct a full sentence.
The content’s equally chaotic. There’s a piece about a homeless blogger who inherited 1.8 million dollars after his mother’s suicide. Five sentences on oxytocin and its effect on neurotransmitters. Something about Johnny Depp making sick kids happy—BRAVO meeting celebrity gossip meeting social media.
The ZEIT online editor said they wanted ze.tt to bring disorder into their orderly digital journalism, unsettle their confidence, make them uncomfortable, try new things. A sandbox for young journalists to experiment. Fine concept. Not like this though. Not this half-formed.
The real question is whether they want an experimental lab that just messes around without worrying about credibility, or if they’re trying to actually matter with smart readers tired of clickbait recycling. That would require a real vision, genuine editorial conviction, something way more ambitious than a muddled cross of three existing magazines.
Soulless click farms are everywhere. They didn’t need to build another.
The editor promised engagement with readers, following the news together, taking their questions seriously. But this public launch is still experimental
—they’re moving into regular operation in September. Hopefully by then the team will know if they actually want this to be good. Maybe they will. Maybe.