European Print Magazine - "Indigo"

A Little Piece of Revolution

"Indigo" aims to be the first print magazine to appear in different languages on the whole continent. But founding a magazine is like giving birth: painful and joyful at the same time


By INGO ARZT
from Berlin, GERMANY


It was in January 2006, somewhere in the Bavarian Alpes: Blue sky, snow covered mountains, eight people gathering together in a small log cabin, me one of them. We did what you usually do when you are young, crazy, close to nature, and drink too much mulled wine: We talked about a revolution. All of those eight guys grew up doing some idealistic stuff like founding Youth Press organizations, creating own projects or whatever. Now we where in our mid-twenties and needed something new.

A revolution's too much and somehow retro, we figured out soon. But we could at least change the European journalism. Or, to be realistic, found a European magazine, as an organ for all those people who somehow feel European, who love this continent, without really being able to realize what that feeling means. We'll help them, we thought.

More than a year later, we did the first issue of our baby, "Indigo", as we finally named it. It appears in seven different languages and is made by a team of young journalists, spread all over the continent. At the beginning it sounded like an impossible plan, but we thought: let's see if there are enough people out there who just believe in the same idea. And we found them.

In December 2006, when "Indigo" was still named "Brel", we started. We named an editor-in-chief, me. Our seed capital: Me, who just finished his journalism school and some internships, my roommate Hermann, a freaky layouter with his own little company, Jochen, a journalist working for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Bjorn, former head of the German Youth Press, and Hans, who did an Internship in South Africa during that time. And a bunch other guys who said: We'll help you out.

I started and called the desk in my room the "editorial office". We created a webpage, a first draft of the concept and used our contacts to ask people to join us. It was clear, to create a European magazine, we can't do it on our own. If we want to define what Europe means, if we want to catch and describe the strange fascination of this continent, we need a European team. So we decided to organize a conference in Dortmund, Germany, in January 2007 and have defined a goal: the first issue should be ready for the 50th anniversary of Europe, the 25th of March, the celebration of the Roman treaties.

The European online-magazine cafebabel.com helped us a lot as to put our call for participants on their web page, the European Youth Press and the Federation of Young European Journalism students put us in their newsletters. In December 2006, shortly before Christmas, the first e-mails arrived with people who said, yeah, cool idea, we always dreamed of this. I never expected that three months later, our German editor Jochen will attend the celebration of the Roman treaties, handing out our magazine to a lot of important people. But we did it.

For the conference, the "Erich Brost Institute" in Dortmund gave us seminar rooms for free and covered the travel expenses of the participants of the first editorial meeting. They came from France, Spain, Poland, Italy, Beglium, Romania, Netherlands and Germany. The conference started, and "Kyrill" came. The storm which caused widespread damage across Western Europe, especially in Germany. It almost blew away our conference: The French delegation was stuck somewhere at the French-German border and arrived a day later, Zofia from Poland had to spent a night in a train, as the railway tracks were blocked by trees. But nevertheless, the conference was a full success. In three days we found a concept for the magazine, and a team. We named editors-in-chief for the different language editions, an organization team, a photo team, a translation team, everything we needed to create the first issue.

It's now ready for download on www.indigomag.eu. We didn't manage to perfectly stick to our schedule, as on the 25th of March we only had a excerpt of the English version. But taking in account that we had no money, just enthusiasm, it's amazing. There where people taking holiday just to write stories for our magazine. Translators worked for free, illustrators painted, our photographers and others took a week off just to produce a title page.

At the beginning of March we finally rented a real editorial office, and the whole editorial team traveled to Berlin for a week to produce "Indigo". There were people working 80 hours a week just to finish a dream: An European magazine that gives a strange feeling of a common Europe its own printed magazine. It'll be a long way to establish "Indigo". Sponsors are rare. The European Union is slow with support, they don't see the chance in what it would mean to support a group of young, enthusiastic journalists. And the magazine itself will need a lot of brainstorming, freaky ideas and idealists to finally express European lifestyle. But we think it's worth the effort.