It’s a new year, I just finished a colossal project and with all that new time at my hands I’m left to think about the future. After doing iHeartBerlin for 17 years now, I have this looming question over my head: What the hell we gonna do now? I’m not joking, I’m seriously asking: where do we go from here?
Are we going to turn iHeartBerlin into a fashion brand? Are we going to turn into a print magazine? Are we going to become an online city guide? Are we going to turn ourselves into a closed community? Are we going to change our name, logo, and concept – or keep going as we are? Or are we gonna switch off the lights from one day to the next?
Over the years, I’ve tried to answer this question again and again in so many meetings with the rest of the team, I’ve lost countless nights of sleep over this. It’s like an impossible question – but it keeps coming back. Or maybe it’s not impossible. Maybe I’m the problem. Am I the problem? Is there even a problem? Can’t we just go on like we always do? After 17 years we’ve proven if there is one thing we are good at it’s going on.
It’s quite a challenge. I can’t seem to treat it objectively because it’s impossible to separate myself – Frank, the founder – from this thing that is iHeartBerlin. To me, iHeartBerlin is not a company, a project, a publication, a platform, (it’s truly all of that combined somehow) but it’s a reflection of me. It’s a point of identification. My life is so intertwined with it, not just professionally, but also emotionally. I guess this comes with the territory of a “passion project”. Or maybe it’s me being an Aquarius.
To Go With The Flow
Nothing with this project was ever really planned. It just happened, everything always fell into place – naturally, you could say. From its more or less random conception as a little blog to its rise to popularity, to its transition to a legacy publication – iHeartBerlin always just went with the flow without ever trying to force anything.
Does that sound anticlimactic? I hope it doesn’t, because of course there was a lot of work and diligence and creativity required. But still, iHeart was never the result of some big waves.
I leave it up to you to decide if that’s a good or a bad thing. But again, this is something deeply connected to myself, because this is how my entire life has worked out so far. To me, it’s a privilege and a curse at the same time though. On the one hand, I’m that blessed bitch where things just always fell into place, on the other I never learned to risk something or fight hard for something.
I’ve seen the people around me doing similar things going very different routes and this has always raised so many questions I would have otherwise never asked myself. I’ve seen blogs becoming agencies (while some were agencies already to begin with), bloggers becoming influencers becoming celebrities. I’ve seen them do publicity stunts to get into the press, I’ve seen them win awards for their projects, get featured in a lot of other media. I’ve seen them start companies, but also closing them down again. I’ve seen them marry, get kids, build houses. But I’ve also seen them die.
I don’t look at any of them with envy or judgment. I never compare myself really. But of course, I still wonder where I or iHeartBerlin would be had I ever chosen a different route. Should I have made some big waves at some point? But what would that have meant for me and the project in the long run? Was it not more authentic to me to make many small ripples instead?
Keeping Up With Everything
Doing a project in the public eye that is in large parts depending on reach, reputation, and reception is definitely a game of its own. It’s fun, it’s fulfilling, it strokes the ego, it connects you to so many things and people. I owe so many good things in my life to this project which I will be forever grateful for. But there is an exhausting element to it as well – a shadow side if you will – that can become a real challenge at times, to put it mildly.
Keeping up with everything, staying relevant, remaining in the good graces of the people you cater to, keeping their attention, just staying visible. I wish I could just confidently proclaim that I always managed to keep my foot on all these other bitches necks. But to tell you the truth, there are quite a few 20-something baddies on IG that have their tippies on my neck instead.
Wow, when I started with this, I really didn’t know what I was in for – especially considering longevity. But when I started there was also just a handful of other people like me that published independently on whatever platform. It was such a different environment. This was before apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok hijacked everyone’s time and attention. And now the environment we operate in is much louder, more competitive, more fast-paced. For the longest time, these were not factors for us, but they somehow appeared around us along the way and we did our best to manage them – sometimes more or less successfully.
One of the most frustrating parts of all of this though is the slow realization that outside entities began to dictate what we have to do to remain visible as a project. I guess we were lucky that at least in the first decade of iHeart’s existence we were blissfully free to do whatever we felt like and were actually also successful with it. I can’t tell you the exact moment when we lost that freedom, it was of course a slow process. And I still haven’t come to terms with it that now instead of an editor-in-chief it’s social media platforms that make the rules of what goes and what doesn’t.
The Way Ahead of Us
Change has always been part of iHeartBerlin in the same way that it is part of myself. I can’t stick to the same things forever, so I can’t keep iHeart the same way forever. And for the most part, the change has always come naturally.
But I feel like this became different during the pandemic – a lot of things that happened around that time affected us in ways that are still unfolding to this very day. Our world has become more volatile and unpredictable. This is clearly no longer a smooth ride and this has me in my feelings.
A part of me is scared, another part of me wants chaos and destruction.
So I find myself at a peculiar turning point after 17 years. And this applies both to myself and iHeartBerlin. 17 is kind of a special number for me. I always kind of cherished this number, but without really questioning its meaning. It’s a mystery to me.
And in the same way, the future of iHeartBerlin is in a shroud of mystery. Will we continue on the same route, or will we change further into something new? I don’t know. Probably, no one can really answer where we should go from here on out. But at least I can ask you:
will you be with me on the way?
photos: Omar Sherif
