For most of my teenage years, I craved to become a journalist (if I wasn't playing with the idea of becoming a nuclear physicist).

One reason East Germans took to the streets in summer '89 was their government censoring the popular German issue of the magazine the Soviet Union's take on "Reader's Digest". It was from this magazine, Sputnik, that East Germans learnt about the crimes of Stalin, and about the fates of artists who had been persecuted for political reasons. Gorbatshev's policy of glasnost had led to more honesty in the Soviet Union, and the East German regime wanted to keep its subjects ignorant, so they outlawed the East German edition of Sputnik.

Under communism, I had lived too isolated a life to actually ever get hold of any piece of Samizdat literature, so the loss of Sputnik actually impacted me.

(*God I am glad they kept their logo.)

For a few short, glorious years scores of phantastic, obscure, weird, quirky magazines and fanzines were popping up everywhere like flowers in the Tundra after a long, hard winter — Gabi's Tasche, Ich und Mein Staubsauger, S(ch)teinschlag, and I jumped at the first opportunity to work for a newspaper.

It only took me a few years to become utterly disillusioned with what journalism could actually achieve in the 1990s. A horrible decline sat in, and while some of my fellow journalists were most concerned with the possibility of image manipulation due to Photoshop becoming a thing, what bugged me most was how real journalists vanished. Marketing departments started providing press statements which were published verbatim as journalistic pieces, or performed infront of a camera by young, blonde bobble heads.

Real, scruffy, old journalists were replaced by these pretty, hollow bobble-heads — actors posing as journalists: There was no longer any glory in striving to one day being a quality journalist. So I quit and found somehing more interesting to do.

I could cite endless examples of journalism done wrong during the last few decades, but since we are currently (hopefully) seeing the end of this nightmare, it makes more sense to focus on the phantastic, obscure, weird flowers popping up in the Tundra of the internet, now that the mainstream media's "fake news" smear is about to backfire.

Both the big mainstream media and young college students are thirsting for a Maoist Cultural Revolution, and the names of dissidents are once again put on hit lists with the explicit goal to doxx and silence them, so an exodus from the old social media unavoidable.

So while CNN and New York Times are circling the drain, while Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. are suspending users and deleting content, I'm watching the budding flowers. There are lots of new platforms, and lots of new politically incorrect journalist collectives emerging at the moment, who are willing to tackle issues people actually care about.