What Ten Years of a City Blog Looks Like

I’ve known Frank and Claudio from iHeartBerlin since roughly the same time this journal started—long enough that the friendship predates any real sense of what either of us was building. We went to the same parties, traveled on the same press trips, had the kind of late-night conversations that feel profound at the time and are impossible to reconstruct the next morning. While I was busy writing myself into various corners, they were quietly assembling what became the definitive Berlin blog: specific, visually alive, deeply embedded in the city’s culture in a way that never tipped into boosterism.

iHeartBerlin at ten felt like a landmark worth marking. The party was at Kraftwerk, Berlin’s converted power station venue, which has a combination of industrial scale and genuine warmth that matched what the blog always felt like—something that understood the city without romanticizing it into a postcard. Aérea Negrot and Natalia Escobar played. It was a good night.

Ten years of a blog is a strange achievement in an era when most publications that existed in 2007 are now either corporate content machines or dead. What Frank and Claudio kept was harder than it sounds: a point of view that stayed consistent even as the city and the internet changed around it.