Most magazines have opinions. +3 Magazin has questions. Three of them, to be precise, printed on the cover of every issue. No editorials, no commentary, no hot takes. Just three questions about things that matter — and then, inside, the answers from experts and ordinary readers, printed side by side, with equal weight and equal space.
The concept is almost aggressively simple, and that is exactly why it works. Founded by Iwan Ittermann and Robert Willmann through their Warum Verlag ("Why Publishing House" — the name is not accidental), +3 Magazin appears monthly as a free supplement inside the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany's most respected broadsheets. With a print run of 300,000 copies and an additional 80,000 or so digital subscribers, it reaches an enormous audience for what is essentially a participatory thought experiment on newsprint.
Each issue poses three questions to roughly nine experts from different fields, then invites its readership to respond as the tenth voice. The answers are published together — a philosophy professor next to a nurse, a CEO next to a retired teacher, a reader from Stuttgart next to a reader from Berlin. Your name appears on the page. Your opinion appears in print. The editors describe this as putting the reader in "a completely new relationship with their newspaper," and that is not an overstatement. In a media landscape where the audience is increasingly talked at, +3 Magazin does something radical by simply shutting up and listening.
The questions themselves range from the enormous to the intimate: What can telemedicine do? What makes children happy? How safe do we feel? What innovations are improving the world? There are no trick questions, no gotcha moments, no partisan framing. The role of the editorial team shifts from privileged commentator to moderator of a public conversation — a distinction that sounds small but changes everything about how the magazine reads.
The advertising model is equally unusual. Ads in +3 Magazin always relate directly to the issue's topic, which means they become part of the discussion rather than an interruption of it. It is a small detail, but it reflects a publication that has thought carefully about every element of its format and asked itself — naturally — why.
In a country with no shortage of serious magazines, +3 Magazin has carved out a niche that did not exist before it arrived. It is not journalism in any traditional sense. It is something closer to a printed forum, a monthly invitation to think about the same questions as 300,000 other people and to discover that the answers are more varied, more surprising, and more human than any single expert could provide.
Explore +3 Magazin at <a href="https://plus-drei.de/" target="\_blank">plus-drei.de