Background

I work where journalism, language and technology meet. Since 2008 I have been an innovation manager at Deutsche Welle, in a team that takes part in European research projects and turns the results into tools newsrooms use.

My current focus is language technology. plain X is a platform for adapting content into other languages: transcription, translation, subtitling and voice-over in one workflow. It grew out of research at DW Innovation with our partner Priberam. Today it is Deutsche Welle’s official content adaptation platform, used by more than 1,000 editors, and is available to other organisations.

I also write the Babylon Newsletter, a weekly publication on multilingual AI. Its aim is to keep language specialists informed and to build a network of like-minded experts and practitioners in this field.

Another project I am involved in is ChatEurope, an early experiment in how to combine news offerings with an AI chatbot, run together with 15 European news partners.

Since 2009 I have worked on data-driven journalism. I am co-founder of Datawrapper, a tool for creating charts, maps and tables. I was its CEO from 2009 to 2024 and am now shareholder and chairman. More than 600 newsrooms use Datawrapper, among them the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, SPIEGEL and Süddeutsche Zeitung. I am also a co-author of the Data Journalism Handbook.

Earlier, I trained as a journalist and studied history and economics at the University of Cologne. In 1995, in the early days of the internet, I founded a small consulting company with clients such as Sony, McKinsey and Merck KGaA. I then spent three years as CEO and partner of a Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt venture reporting on venture-funded companies in Germany.