About mokant.at

mokant.at

mokant.at was an independent Austrian online magazine based in Vienna, launched in March 2010 as the successor to the youth magazine CHiLLi.cc. It described itself with the tagline of an online magazine with bite, and it aimed primarily at politically and culturally interested young readers between 16 and 35. Articles appeared several times a week on politics, society, culture and music, with a deliberate emphasis on niche subjects and fresh angles that larger Austrian outlets were unlikely to cover. Yet mokant.at was never only a magazine. From its founding it understood itself as a training medium for young journalists, teaching research, writing, interviewing and image editing and then letting trainees publish real work, and over the years it gained a reputation as a talent forge whose contributors moved on to established Austrian media. The editorial team largely dissolved in 2017, the website continued for some years in archive form, and by November 2025 it was no longer reachable, a quiet end that readers consulting older references should keep in mind.

Founding as the successor to CHiLLi.cc

mokant.at was founded in March 2010 by Michaela Wein, Julia Staller, Stefan Hohenwarter and Christian Eder. It emerged directly from CHiLLi.cc, the Vienna youth magazine whose cooperation with Die Presse had ended at the close of 2009 and whose supporting association then re-formed, without its earlier publisher, and launched the new portal on 18 March 2010. The media owner of mokant.at was that same association, CHiLLi, the Association for Free and Independent Media, which preserved an institutional continuity between the two titles even as the name, design and editorial leadership changed. The editorship was initially held by Michaela Wein together with Stefan Hohenwarter, and later by Wein together with Julia Staller. In December 2011 Sofia Khomenko was elected editor-in-chief, and she became the magazine's long-serving editor-in-chief and publisher, the figure most closely associated with its mature years.

The transition was noticed beyond the youth media scene itself. Austria's national quality newspaper Der Standard reported the change on 22 March 2010 under the headline that CHiLLi.cc was becoming mokant.at, giving the relaunch a place in the contemporaneous record of the Austrian media trade press. That coverage is useful to historians of the title for a simple reason: it dates the public arrival of the new name independently of the magazine's own later accounts, and it confirms that the launch was understood at the time, by observers outside the association, as a continuation of the CHiLLi.cc project under a new identity rather than as an unrelated start-up. The founding team and the owning association were the bridge between the two titles, while the new name signalled that the successor intended to speak to a somewhat older young readership than a school-age youth page.

Readers, subjects and editorial line

The magazine addressed young people with an interest in politics and culture, formally described as the 16 to 35 age group, and published several times a week across politics, society, culture and music. Its reporting deliberately sought niche topics and new perspectives rather than competing headline for headline with Austria's daily newspapers. The editorial team comprised up to 30 contributors at its height. That scale, small beside a national newsroom but substantial for an independent youth title run through an association, allowed mokant.at to sustain regular publishing while keeping its founding bargain: experienced guidance at the top, and young writers doing the reporting as a way of learning the profession by practising it in public.

Interviews and distinctive reporting

The clearest evidence of the magazine's editorial character is its interview record. In 2011, during the controversial Austrian animal rights trial, mokant.at was one of the few media to publish a detailed interview with one of the defendants, Chris Moser, at a moment when the case was a subject of intense public argument about protest, policing and civil liberties. It also conducted, as the only Austrian medium, an interview with the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, which was subsequently published in the Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse, a republication that signalled how far a small training magazine's work could travel. Other prominent interviewees documented in the record include Sebastian Kurz, Heinz-Christian Strache, Felix Gottwald and Hermann Nitsch, a list that spans party politics, sport and the arts and shows that senior public figures were willing to sit down with its young interviewers.

A training medium for young journalists

Training was written into the magazine's self-understanding from its founding period. Aspiring journalists were offered grounded instruction in research, writing style, interview technique and image editing, together with the opportunity to put what they had learned into practice by publishing on the site itself. In the cause of promoting youth and early-career journalism, mokant.at worked with Jugendpresse, the Austrian youth press organisation, and with European Youth Press, its European umbrella. The obverse of the model also proved true: large numbers of young journalists used mokant.at as their entry point into journalism and later found positions at renowned media organisations, and retrospective accounts describe the title straightforwardly as a talent forge for Austrian journalists and media makers, listing a long roll of former editors who went on to professional careers. Few Austrian outlets of comparable size can document an alumni effect of that kind.

Partnerships with tink.ch and VIVA

From autumn 2012 mokant.at maintained a partnership with the Swiss online magazine tink.ch, linking its Vienna newsroom to a comparable youth publication across the border. Also from autumn 2012 it cooperated with the music channel VIVA. Within that cooperation mokant.at conducted interviews with the protagonists of the VIVA programme VIVA 180 Grad, which were also published on VIVA's website. The two partnerships pointed in the directions the magazine cared about most: peer youth media in the German-language region on one side, and music and popular culture on the other. Neither partnership changed the ownership or the training mission, but both widened the audience that a small association-run magazine could plausibly reach.

Concert promotion and support for Austrian bands

From 2013 mokant.at increasingly acted as a concert promoter, offering emerging Austrian bands a stage. The move extended its music coverage from writing about performance into organising it, and it fitted the same promotional logic as its journalism training: the magazine used its platform to give young Austrian talent, whether reporters or musicians, a first public opportunity. Contemporary summaries treat the concert activity as a genuine second strand of the organisation rather than a one-off event series, and it helps explain why the title was remembered in Vienna's cultural scene as well as in journalism circles.

The mokant.at Akademie

In 2014 the magazine launched the mokant.at Akademie, an affordable and practice-oriented training and continuing-education offer for early-career journalists. Across several days it ran workshops on subjects such as research, writing style and interview technique, led by the mokant.at editorial team together with prominent guest speakers from Austrian quality newspapers. The academy's cooperation partners were the Association of Austrian Newspapers, IG Publizistik and Jugendpresse. The academy formalised what the magazine had always done informally at its own desks, and charged modestly for it, turning the training mission into a structured programme that outsiders could book. It is one of the most concrete institutional legacies documented for the title.

Recognition

The training model received formal recognition in 2014, when mokant.at received the junior prize, the Nachwuchspreis, of the New Media Journalism Award, the prize awarded by the Austrian Journalists Club for outstanding work in online journalism. The award is significant for this profile because it recognised precisely the combination that defined the magazine: online publishing carried out as a school for the next generation. This profile relies for that fact on the award's own published list of recipients, and it makes no broader claim about other prizes, for which the sources consulted provide no reliable record.

Dissolution, archive years and legacy

The ending was gradual rather than dramatic. In 2017 the editorial team largely dissolved, and in the following years the website was continued in archive form rather than as a living magazine. By November 2025 the site was no longer reachable at all. Older reference entries, written while the magazine was active, describe mokant.at in the present tense and give Sofia Khomenko as editor-in-chief without noting the dissolution, so readers should treat the present-tense picture as historical. The legacy that survives verification is threefold: a body of youth-focused reporting and interviews between 2010 and the late 2010s, including the Pussy Riot interview republished by Die Presse; an academy and workshop model that carried its training mission beyond its own newsroom; and a generation of Austrian journalists who began, as the record puts it, by using mokant.at as their entry into the profession. As the successor to CHiLLi.cc and a Vienna institution in its own right for the first half of the 2010s, mokant.at closes the story of independent, association-run youth journalism in Austria that had begun in 1999.