No Culture. No Future. – A Film About the Importance of Arts & Culture

No Culture. No Future. – A Film About the Importance of Arts & Culture

A few months ago I published a story about how the lockdown has seemed to have created a new dogma of system relevance that discriminates against arts and culture workers. This was a story very close to my heart and close to what matters to all of us at iHeartBerlin.

While some cultural institutions were able to re-open since then, although under challenging circumstances, the overall situation has not improved for the majority of the scene. Especially in the alternative and underground scenes, it’s still quite dramatic. While publicly funded institutions don’t really have to worry about going under, it’s those independent arts and culture makers that really have to fear for their livelihoods. Rents and bills still need to be paid, but to produce shows and events is still often not possible, and support programs by the government have so many blind spots and leave a lot of people behind or are simply not enough. For many, the situation is really serious. And considering we are only at the beginning of the second (most likely bigger) wave that will bring new challenges and restrictions you don’t even want to begin to imagine how much worse it could get.

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Don’t take Free Things for Granted: 10 Years of Free Digital Publishing

Don’t take Free Things for Granted: 10 Years of Free Digital Publishing

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Nobody from our team of iHeartBerlin ever planned to become a full-time blogger or to be working as an independent publisher in the beginning of the project. If we would have thought it through from the beginning we would have logically stepped away from doing anything like that. Essentially because it does not sound really promising.

First you put years of money, energy and time into a project that is freely available to everybody and has no financial outcome. Secondly, even if it turns out to become eventually a business like it happened for us, you never know if this business model will be outdated and irrelevant in a short period of time.

So why did we become an independent publisher in Berlin than? A city with no big brands or investors and no state-funding for digital publishers? The answers to this questions and also why we decided to collaborate with Flattr, a new digital startup supporting independent content creators all over the world is easy.

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