Project R is launched

On the day of the Epiphany Conference of the Swiss Press in Zurich, the journalistic platform "Project R" presented its management team. The young company also moved into its first editorial offices: three hotel rooms in Kreis 4. While the Swiss publishers and media managers met at the World Trade Center in Zurich, "the baby of the Swiss press crawled into the public eye", as those responsible for "Project R" announced on Tuesday.

The eight-strong management team is complete and includes well-known names such as Constantin Seibt and Christof Moser as well as PR consultant Susanne Sugimoto as Managing Director and photographer Laurent Burst as Strategy Manager. Until further notice, three rooms in the Hotel Rothaus, a former hotel by the hour on Langstrasse, will serve as editorial offices. Moving into the hotel rooms will allow the set-up crew to work together more intensively to drive the project forward. Launch in early 2018 "Project R" aims to pursue a new business model that is independent of media groups. However, the digital magazine says it will not only rely on journalistic brilliance. Business aspects should not be ignored. A crowdfunding platform is to be launched in May. The editorial team will then be set up from the summer. The "baby of the Swiss press" should then go online at the beginning of 2018. (SDA)

Foundation of legal companies: January/February 2017

Crowdfunding: May/June 2017

Structure of the editorial office: from summer 2017

Launch of digital magazine: Beginning of 2018

The construction crew includes:

Susanne Sugimoto, 53

Management

Susanne Sugimoto knows SMEs, politics, trade unions and large corporations from the inside. She completed an apprenticeship as a chemist (just a stone's throw away from Rothaus). She then completed her Matura and went on to study geography and business informatics. (The first child came on the last day of the first semester, the second on the first day of the last). Shortly afterwards, she sat on Zurich's municipal council and became Central Secretary at the Swiss Commercial Association, where she represented ground staff after the grounding of Swissair, among other things. Then, out of curiosity, she switched to the side with which she had previously negotiated wages for ten years: the corporations. She became head of the media office at Coop. And five years later, she became head of the communications team for Central Europe at the cement multinational Holcim. Today she runs her own consultancy firm. As managing director at Project R, her job is to keep track of the budget, personnel and day-to-day business. In short: the task of most Project R team members is to build up complexity. Her job is to reduce complexity.

Laurent Burst, 37

Strategy

Laurent Burst started his business activity at 13 when he entered high school, with production, printing and advertising acquisition at a school newspaper, programmed professional databases during the vacations at 14, owned the school's first cell phone at 15, worked as a reporter for the Zug press at 16, was Head of Communications at Brainstore at 17, a member of the Board of Directors at 21 and took over the management at 23. At 28 - after 10 years of management experience - he moved to the packaging company Stewo, first as a product manager, then as a member of the management (the youngest ever, the first with a part-time workload), received the book "Annie Leibowitz at Work" as a Christmas present at 30, spent a sleepless night, resigned on New Year's Eve and started his father's profession: photographer. He photographed for publications such as GQ and the Wall Street Journal, traveled around the world three times a year, missed teamwork - and has been building a start-up since 2014: "Mr. Rizzi", an import company for exotic drinks from all over the world. At Projekt R, he is responsible for designing the business plan and legal form - and for the most polite way to ask the toughest questions. (Questions are the specialty of Burst, whose boss once stuck a load of toothpicks in his shirt at lunch and announced: for every question Burst asked, he would take out a toothpick, and after the last toothpick there would be silence for the rest of the day). Unfortunately, we don't have any toothpicks at Project R: Burst intends to pester the project so hard with questions in the Board of Directors that it will still be expandable in 20 years' time.

Nadja Schnetzler, 44

Processes and collaboration

Nadja Schnetzler started out at a school newspaper, which turned into a business even before she graduated from high school: placing advertisements for school newspapers. Later, at the Ringier School of Journalism, she did internships at media as diverse as Bild and Taz. But it was one day in the spring of 1997 that made all the difference: Schnetzler and her future husband decided to open a new kind of business in a store in Biel during the fall vacations: an ideas store called Brainstore. The first products were unbeatably cheap - passers-by could get three ideas for 9 francs 90. (A typical question was, for example, how to get a retired husband to go out again). To everyone's amazement, this developed into an internationally active company: at its peak, Brainstore employed 80 people and 3,000 freelancers - and developed ideas for companies, NGOs, private individuals and governments on every continent except Antarctica. (You can find out more about the theory and practice of industrial idea production in Schnetzler's book "The Idea Machine"). In 2012, Nadja Schnetzler set up her own business as a collaboration coach with "Word and Deed". At Project R, her mandate is development and collaboration: How do you make something better? How do you make it simpler? And how can you rethink something?

Clara Vuillemin, 24

Head of IT

Clara Vuillemin studied mechanical and electrical engineering in Lausanne and Moscow. In addition, she worked in numerous jobs: on a farm, for NGOs in New York, Perm (in the Urals) and Kazakhstan, was a reporter for the Moscow Deutsche Zeitung, app programmer in Winterthur, IT manager at Rotpunktverlag Zurich, politician for the Young Greens, and - her favorite job to date - taught physics to engineering students in Lausanne: Mechanics, electrical engineering, quantum theory. She speaks fast and thinks even faster. One of her favorite phrases is: "Let's get this shit done!" If Vuillemin doesn't understand something, it's not her who has a problem, but the person who has said something incomprehensible. Her job at Project R is to build an IT architecture: open source, usable for other media and developers, adaptable to the development and ideas of the editorial team: "I want it to be beautiful. I want it to be fast. I want it to be secure."

Patrick Recher, 28

Software development

Patrick Recher, the man for the databases, did his IT apprenticeship at Swisscom, where every apprentice was given a general subscription and the opportunity to apply for a job anywhere in the company. He was fascinated by networks: he had already wired up the neighbors' houses at the age of twelve. What fascinated him less was studying computer science afterwards: it was all outdated software. ("For computer scientists, it's good manners to drop out of university.") Nevertheless, he was twice Swiss runner-up in computer science. And received a gold medal (unfortunately not a bar) from the Swiss National Bank for his final thesis on the financial crisis. He landed his biggest coup with his Matura thesis: he developed an app for the first iPhone that labeled any landscape photo with the names of places, rivers and mountains. Recher beat the developers from the ETH, who had failed with a similar project. And he had a job as an app developer before he even graduated. At Project R, his responsibility is to develop the programs for everything hidden: Item management, user management, payment processing - "always with an innovative twist."

Thomas Preusse, 25

Software development

Thomas Preusse managed to win two journalism awards in record time as a programmer - even though he "would rather write 100 lines of code than a single sentence". In 2016, he won the Zurich Journalism Prize (with Markus Häfliger) for uncovering the Kazakhstan affair, which put the then President of the National Council, Christa Markwalder, in a tight spot. Preusse had built the search engine that was used to search through a data leak from the Kazakh government. The year before, he and an NZZ team had won the German Reporter Prize for the best web reportage: a reconstruction of flight MH370, which disappeared without a trace over the Indian Ocean. Preusse began his career as a web designer at an advertising agency in Canada and most recently worked at the web agency "Interactive Things" in Zurich. Preusse's main job at Project R is to build the so-called front end: an interface that should function as unobtrusively for readers and editors as the butler in an English castle.

Constantin Seibt, 50

Concept and editing

Constantin Seibt was a child who read adventure novels. And made a plan to do the same one day: Not to go on adventures. But to write adventure novels. At 22, he came closest to his goal: he wrote a crime novel with a colleague. This resulted in commissions from newspapers. Seibt stayed in journalism, first at the Zurich student newspaper ZS, later at the weekly WOZ and finally at the Tages-Anzeiger. His specialty became the grey area between politics and business: from the financial crisis to the euro crisis. He was awarded the Zurich Journalism Prize in 2008 for his series of reports on the Swissair trial. Seibt is one of the few reporters who not only has a practice, but also a theory: his book "Deadline" on the craft of writing was published in 2015. The bottom line is that Seibt has missed his target by 180 degrees: It is true that his profession as a reporter transformed his professional life into a string of small adventures. But the adventure novel remained unwritten. Project R should ensure that it stays that way.

Christof Moser, 37

Concept and editing

Christof Moser wanted to become a journalist even before he could spell Z - and after it turned out that being a rainforest researcher would not have been a good career choice due to arachnophobia. So he launched his first school newspaper at the age of 12, which developed into a magazine ("Nachtisch") by the end of his school days and then even further - until it went bankrupt. The publication was taken in by a fraudster. And Moser paid off up to 25 printing bills. After completing a commercial apprenticeship, Moser went into journalism as a trainee at Brückenbauer (today's Migros magazine). In 2000, he was one of Switzerland's first online journalists at the business portal "Moneycab", followed by stints as a political reporter at Facts, Weltwoche and SonntagsBlick and an aborted TV stint at "10vor10". Most recently, he worked as a parliamentary journalist and media critic for Schweiz am Sonntag. He also helped set up Infosperber and teaches journalism students political and business journalism, storytelling and media ethics. At Project R, Moser can live out a previously hidden talent: drawing plans. Because a media project needs lots of them.