Portrait of Timm Klotzek

For the past five years, young people in Germany between the ages of 20 and 35 have had their own magazine and thus a spiritual home: NEON was set up in 2003 under the slogan “Actually we should be growing up” and thus defined for the first time the embryonic feeling of a generation between university and the first job, between a first child and long-distance relationship, between “How do I negotiate a salary?” and “Where can I go to party?” The young publisher left Stern, which is part of the publishing house Gruner + Jahr, and started the magazine with a circulation of 150,000 copies. His very first edition consciously introduced the hundred most important young Germans. This mixture between understatement and trend setting was well received. The monthly magazine now has a circulation of more than 230,000, with twenty editorial employees for print and three for online. The editorial office is based in Munich.

Different to other magazines

NEON really is different to other magazines for this younger target group: NEON asks more questions than it supplies answers to because “that is what this age group does in real life,” says Timm Klotzek, who is one of the two chief editors. "Will I get a job?" "Can I keep my job?" "Should I get married?" "When is it the right time to have a child?" "Should I go abroad again?" "How do I know that someone is the right partner for me?" This phase between 20 and 35 years old is characterised by uncertainty and this is what NEON reflects. The magazine does not try to be cleverer than its readers. Reportage delivers different viewpoints of the world but is never hectoring. So, for example, NEON was one of the first German magazines to report on Africans in the woods outside Melilla who wait, sometimes for years, for a crossing to Europe, and in the interim eke out their existence in a no-mans land.

NEON also revealed the story of Benjamin Prüfer. After spending a night with his HIV-infected flirty girl Sreykeo, he decided not to leave her to her fate, but took care of her and in fact married her and brought her back to Germany for better medical treatment. Stories like this are paired with a lot of up-to-date information on the latest books, films, computer games, bands, as well as various columns that have given the magazine its own quite specific touch. For example, right at the beginning the actress Heike Makatsch wrote a regular column about things that you have to invent in order to make everyday life bearable. Another employee reported on his fight with various institutions and their rules and regulations. Particularly popular are snapshot pieces - even readers can write about curious observations from everyday life; then there is the “Useless Information” rubric, made up of curious facts thrown together – formats which have been frequently copied by other magazines.

Magazine with its own Community

Another key reason for the success of NEON is its cross-media strategy. The magazine’s website was one of the first to build a community: not only could the user catch up on articles, but also write their own texts as well as network. Sometimes articles come out of these texts, “We look to see what people are writing about and what our users read and comment on – our daily market research so to speak – so that we do not simply rely on the thoughts of our twenty editorial staff. Thus in several rubrics the reader also becomes the creator of the magazine,” explains Klotzek.

Timm Klotzek founded and developed NEON. The 36-year-old from Frankfurt am Main did not decide he wanted to be a journalist from the days at his school newspaper. “At 15 I still didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says, and sometimes sees his whole success story as pure chance. In 2006 NEON won the Lead Award and Klotzek, together with the other Chief Editor, were celebrated as “Journalists of the Year” by leading magazines in the same branch. For others however, Klotzek’s career has been more straightforward: after studying at the School of Journalism in Munich and working freelance for the magazine jetzt, the young people’s magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Klotzek became Germany’s youngest editorial chief for jetzt at the age of 28. This did not last long however as he was suddenly made redundant when the publishers decided to close down the magazine. “To be made redundant like this is really not a joke, however it should not stop anyone from starting again with even more determination and even better journalism”. He was not alone in this thought: Klotzek received a phone call from Gruner + Jahr in Hamburg and was asked to conceive a brand new magazine. And that is how NEON started.

Crisis offers Chances

Of course such a magazine can only spring into being when it is properly financed and given freedoms through the backing of a large publisher. And that is precisely what makes new products, even successful ones, vulnerable. “You can never be certain that something will work, “ Klotzek says, and points out the parallels between the crisis in the media of 2002 to which jetzt fell victim, and the present one. Yet Klotzek is not the sort of journalist to complain. “A crisis also offers up the chance of pushing through something new. The competition is not only print media, we are also courting people’s time”. At present there are mountains of niche products, whether in print or online. Who is going to read it all? “I believe that the market for good journalism will exist for a long time yet and it will be possible to earn a great deal of money from it. However you will have to identify specific markets, hit a world, and there find faithful readers.” The 36-year old takes his own generation severely to task, “Many young journalists are too streamlined. Far too many stories that are proposed are based on weak research. People take a look at the paper and ask themselves, 'hmm, how can I get a story in there, how can I come across as a writer,' and then are surprised that they are turned down. Unfortunately there are far too few people who have an idea and who fight for it with passion.”

Klotzek’s hair has started to turn grey. Has he finally grown up? It looks like it. At the moment he is working on conceiving a magazine for young parents and so-called ‘Lohas’ (those following a Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability). It will be published for the first time in April 2009. The working title is Nest.