'A whole other product to cater to young people'

The efforts of venture-backed new media startups jostling for the attention of millennial audiences has crescendoed in the U.S. in the past couple of years, with sites like Vice, BuzzFeed, Fusion, Vox, Mic, and others ramping up their variety of content and their presence on social media. In Germany, news sites are similarly seeking to capture “young” audiences. But while, in the U.S., many of these efforts to cater to millennials are propped up by venture funding, in Germany, the legacy publishers that have pushed forward their own efforts.
“There’s a whole lot of movement in the German media landscape — this is an incredible time,” Sebastian Horn told me. Horn heads Ze.tt, a project from Zeit Online that first debuted in beta in July. He runs the site from a separate small office space in Berlin, tucked away behind a kitesurfing shop.
Leadership at Zeit first approached Horn with an idea to build a new site, with some support from the publisher, that would target younger audiences. (Horn had been was a community and social media editor at Zeit Online before moving to Source Fabric, a nonprofit group that helps produce open-source software for news organizations).
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