Thomas Seifert is dept. editor in Chief with the Austrian daily newspaper „Wiener Zeitung“, which is published in Vienna since 1703. His reporting includes the Balcans, the Russian Federation (he reported the war in Chechnya in 1999 and 2000 from Grosny both from the Russian and the Chechen perspective), Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He has filed stories from New York in the aftermath of 9-11 and crossed the border to Afghanistan on 10-11 where he reported the fall of the Taliban from Kabul. Seifert reported the war in Iraq from Baghdad in March/April 1999 and celebrated his 35th Birthday on April 9, 2003 on Firdous Square, as Saddam Husseins statue fell. He went back to Iraq and Afghanistan several times.
His book „Schwarzbuch Öl“ („The Black Book on Oil“), which he co-authored together with Klaus Werner came out in 2005. It was a bestseller and was translated into Arabic, Italian, Dutch and Spanish. For this book, he did research in Iraq, Iran, U.A.E., Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia. In 2011 he published “Schwarzbuch Gold” (“The Black Book on Gold”), together wih Brigitte Reisenberger. The book was researched in Austria, Ghana, South Africa, China, Cambodia, China and India.
He has since broadened his focus to Asia (China, India, and the Korean Paninsula) and has just published a book on “The Pacific Epoch”. It covers the dawning Pacific Era and the implications of the rise of Asia for the European Union and the world. Since the economic crisis struck in 2008, he has published a number of articles and interviews on monetary and fiscal politics, the European response to the crisis and the consequences of austerity. Another focus has been the war in Syria: He has travelled to Damascus in the past and has reported from South-Eastern Turkish Kurdistan, Lebanon, Jordan and Northern Iraq to cover the refugee-crisis. 2015 year he was the mind behind “exodus360”, a VR-experience of the life of syrian refugees in Lebanon and Austria, 2017 he was one of the directors in “Escape Velocity”, a series of VR-productions. He directed a documentary piece on a refugee family in Greece. In 2019 he reported from Syria, Iraq and India among other places. From 2020 onwards he focussed on reporting on the pandemic - mostly scientific and economic consequences thereof.
