There is a particular kind of contrarian logic at work when a man decides the best way to cover an exclusively digital phenomenon is to print it on paper and sell it at kiosks. Rainer Kuhn has built a career on exactly that kind of logic. Born in 1961, Kuhn was once among the top hundred tennis players in Switzerland before pivoting to advertising, founding the agency Kuhn & Friends in Winterthur, and winning multiple Art Directors Club Switzerland awards. Then, in 1997, he launched Kult, a satirical magazine that became a fixture of Zürich and St. Gallen nightlife culture. After a cancer diagnosis in 1999, he sold the agency, moved to Zürich, and devoted himself to writing — columns for Blick, books, and eventually songs with his band Beglinger & The Moonshine Band.
In October 2019, Kuhn channelled all of that restless energy into The Influencer, a biannual, 124-page, print-only magazine published from Switzerland. The tagline — "The Stories behind the Storytellers" — signals the editorial approach: this is not a trend report on influencer marketing, nor a glossy celebration of follower counts. It is an interview magazine. Kuhn has said publicly that the influencer scene does not interest him, and neither does the influencer business. What interests him are the people — their biographies, their contradictions, the gap between the curated persona and the actual human being. The interviews run long, uncut, and unafraid of silence.
The print-only commitment is absolute. Kuhn has declared that nothing from the magazine will be published digitally — no excerpts, no social media teasers, no web archive. In his view, if something truly wants to have influence, it must be printed. It is an analogue magazine about an exclusively digital world, and that tension is not a bug but the entire point. At CHF 10 per copy, available at Swiss kiosks, it asks readers to do something influencers rarely demand: put down the phone and pick up a magazine.
By the second issue, published during the pandemic in 2020, Kuhn had secured backing from Schweiz Tourismus and proved the concept could survive beyond a single outing. The design is clean and generous with white space, letting the interviews breathe across well-set pages. For readers familiar with Kult's anarchic energy, the tone here is more measured — but the same instinct is at work: a refusal to cover any subject the way everyone else covers it, and a conviction that the most interesting stories live in the margins of mainstream media.
Whether The Influencer becomes a lasting title or remains a characteristically Kuhnian provocation — a printed middle finger to the algorithm — it has already achieved something rare: it made the word "influencer" interesting again, at least for the length of 124 pages.
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