On October 5, freelancers for the English-language magazine The Berliner went on strike after negotiations with management failed. The main point of contention was an ad promoting the Nova festival exhibition, a travelling show meant to portray the October 7 attack by Hamas on a music festival. As it avoids any mention of the genocide in Gaza, critics accuse it of being war propaganda.
This decision came after management had suppressed articles relating to Palestine for many months. While this editorial line was never formally stated, the magazine’s editor-in-chief repeatedly called for the need to remain “neutral.” This supposed neutrality was then breached by the Nova ads, while reports about Palestine demonstrations or repression in art spaces are forbidden. This comes in the context of the German and Berlin governments censoring speech about Palestine while promoting pro-Israeli propaganda.
Walter Crasshole, a queer columnist for the magazine, said: “In September 2024, I pitched a column about the Palestine/Israel conflict among queers in Berlin and was told no. I later got a private WhatsApp saying, ‘It’s an editorial decision above my pay grade, and I can’t really offer a specific explanation beyond that.’ That’s when I realized the subject was off-limits and that management had created real unease among the editorial team.”
On October 5, the ad was posted on The Berliner’s Instagram page. A member of the writing staff commented that the issue was not with the exhibit itself but rather “the hypocrisy in how this ad was pushed to the forefront after over a year of sidelining and ignoring reporting on Israel-Palestine. Surely if the idea were to ignore the issue simply, it would follow that we would also not publish the ad.”
The Berliner has no editorial statute. Employees of the magazine report that the owner, Yoram Roth, makes editorial decisions about what topics can be reported on. As one writer put it: “We were forbidden from writing certain stories. There was an explicit order: ‘no more Palestine.’ We tried to work around it at first, but the boundaries of what was acceptable kept tightening. For a while, culture was okay—but then we were told to remove events, demos, and exhibitions that mentioned Palestine. So, it became more and more restrictive.”
Roth is the owner of multiple cultural sites around Berlin, including Clärchens Ballhaus and the Fotografiska museum (as written about in this puff piece). In 2023, Spiegel magazine reported that he acquired a 2.5% stake (1.3 million euros) in Aliada, the parent company of the spyware firm Cytrox—which later became part of the Intellexa Alliance. That company provided spy software to Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Libyan military dictator Khalifa Haftar, as well as to countries like Kazakhstan, Singapore, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The software was used to spy on journalists, creating a terrible conflict of interest for the owner of any publication.
When writing staff found out about the ad in early October, they organized a meeting with management. Together with the editor-in-chief, Jonny Tiernan, they called for the magazine to abandon these ads. They even offered to pay the fee out of their own salaries. However, management refused—and the resulting discussions made it clear that this was an ideological, not just a financial, decision. The people in charge were uninterested in the views of their entire workforce.
Shortly after the first Nova ad was posted, Tiernan emailed the freelancers about his efforts to mitigate the ad’s impact, which included labelling the post as an “advertisement” instead of an “ad” and withholding editorial coverage of the exhibition. The freelancers rejected these measures and went on strike on October 5, withdrawing their work from the November issue and launching a GoFundMe the next day to cover their lost income.
As of today, management maintains its opposition to any compromise or dialogue on the writers’ demands: ending the Nova festival exhibition ad campaign, removing all related ads, ensuring a transparent editorial policy, and clearly separating advertising from editorial content on the website. Independent, free, and unbiased journalism is more important than ever. The Berliner is one of Berlin’s few English-language magazines. In the strikers’ own words, “We want to put an end to the editorial interference that is weakening one of the city’s most vital independent media voices.” If you would like to support the strikers, click here.
