What was your first job as a journalist?
As an editor in the co-founded news agency Amerika21.
Have you ever used a typewriter?
Once upon a time in GDR...
How is social media changing news?
Social media changes reporting for the better only to a very limited extent. The Twitter bubble is taken for social reality and often presented as such in reporting. In other words, more echo chambers and often more gut feelings instead of facts.
Who's your favorite fictional journalist?
Samuel Katelbach
What does it mean to be a journalist?
Stay curious and non-conformist, don't let yourself be fobbed off with ready-made answers, never let yourself be co-opted by politics or business, and never slip into black-and-white thinking....
What's the funniest news-related #hashtag you've seen?
Must still be created...
How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?
Precise and punctuated with dry humor
What tools and software do you use to do your job?
my hands and my laptop...
What's your favorite social network?
Despite all toxic tendencies and Buble formation: TwitterX.
Who do you wish followed you?
Bob Woodward and Ryszard Kapuscinski
Why did you become a journalist?
The answer will be quite banal. I like to write, research, critique...and like all journalists, I guess I'm not entirely free of the vanity of wanting to write stuff that will also resonate widely and find a readership.
Did you work for your high school newspaper? If so, what did you do there?
Classic stuff: reviews of school theater performances, gossip, scandalizing teacher behavior....
What story are you most proud of writing or working on?
Stories that put the misdemeanors of powerful people in politics, business and the established media on notice....
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
Stay curious, don't let yourself be fobbed off with prefabricated answers, journalistic independence should always be more important than the monetary aspect, stay true to yourself, even if the pressure to adapt is high in many editorial offices. Don't forget that journalism has a social task: Control the power and don't let it control you....
When's the best time to pitch you?
When I am online...
What's the best pitch you ever got?
Can't remember
What's the worst pitch you ever got?
Four-page and poorly written pitch that just dripped with vanity and then simply suggested reviewing his own self-published book.
What's your favorite drink?
Pisco Sour
When you're not at a computer, where are you most likely to be?
In the Bundestag, picking up my son from school, in cafés with friends, doing yoga, or spinning intrigues to destabilize the FRG (at least that's the idea in the German media mainstream ;))
Aside from your own, what's your favorite publication to read?
New Yorker, Le Monde Diplomatique, Granma ;)
What's the most common misperception about your beat?
My sarcastic approaches...
