Zitty  is probably the coolest city magazine in Europe, and when I was editor from 1996 to 2000, we were selling over 60,000 copies on Berlin newsstands. The fortnightly has a rabble-rousing, anarchic tradition stretching back to 1977. It took nearly 20 years for Zitty to get around to appointing an editor-in-chief; me.

This is the rare, first edition of the 1994  Time Out  Guide to Berlin. I contributed and helped organize it. Former Smash Hits editor Dave Rimmer was the editor,  Wolfgang Tillmans,  at the start of his fantastic career, took the pics. The Time Out Guide to Berlin often outsells all other guides in the series.

I joined forces with the founders of Zitty magazine in a joint venture called Urban Media GmbH to publish Metropolis, an English-language monthly for Berlin. Didn't work. We ended up selling the company to  Holtzbrinck,  publishers of Der Tagesspiegel, Die Zeit and Handelsblatt.

Berlin's first post-wall English-language monthly. I engineered the joint venture between myself, Tony Elliott's Time Out in London and Klaus Ehrhardt's Zitty in Berlin. Checkpoint also published the program guide for the first  MTV European Video Awards  in 1994 and also a guide for the Berlin International Film Festival. Initial design for Checkpoint was by Grappa, an East Berlin-based design co-op. The cowgirl in the center of our Oct 96 cover is actress  Jasmin Tabatabei,  before she embarked on her movie career.