about

As of February 2020, I am managing the NZZ visuals department with data journalists, visuals journalists, software developers and OSINT reporters. Before that I built a team of data journalists and data scientists for Tamedia.

I also teach data literacy skills and regularly speak about digital transformation and the disruption of the news industry.

Born in Wales I grew up in the British Midlands and at the age of eight moved to Switzerland.

I think and write in both German and English and am passionate about how data literacy can improve journalism, making it more thorough, precise, relevant – and most importantly, more accountable.

My earliest writing as a journalist appeared in The Daily Star, based in Beirut, where at the time I was also living. Here is some of my work.

From 2002 to 2006 I managed a team of online journalists for news.ch, one of the first online only news outlets in the German speaking world. In 2006 I joined the Swiss Sunday newspaper SonntagsZeitung as a technology reporter. My work has since appeared in a range of newspapers and magazines, besides the SonntagsZeitung, news.ch and The Daily Star the Tages-Anzeiger, Berner Zeitung, Der Bund, Basler Zeitung, Monocle, Das Magazin, Saiten, St. Galler Tagblatt and The Daily Star (Dhaka). (I spent four months on the editorial staff of The Daily Star in Bangladesh on an exchange program funded by the Swiss government. Whenever I hear other journalists complaining about the working conditions in their newspaper, I usually think: «Okay, why don’t you go and spend some time in Dhaka, working for The Daily Star.»)

Over time, I got more interested in technology not as a topic for coverage, but as a tool to investigate stories. In 2011, I became a founding member of Opendata.ch, a foundation focused on opening up the troves of data the Swiss administration has tucked away. I also started to explore new reporting techniques with tools like Google Fusion, Outwib Hub or Open Refine. It was, however, the four month Lede-Program course at Columbia School of Journalism in New York, which I attended in 2016 and my employer Tamedia kindly financed, that finally provided me with programming skills to exercise deep and complex data investigations.

Coupling my experience as a journalist with my newly acquired Python programming skills, I regularly speak on disruption of the news industry and how journalists can improve their reporting by learning how to programme. I have since established various training programmes for journalists – the most extensive being the data journalism diploma at the Swiss data journalism school (MAZ) in Lucerne and day courses at Dataharvest, the European Investigative Journalist Conference, in Mechelen, Belgium.

In Februar 2020, I moved to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, I manage the visuals department consisting of a team of data journalists, information designers, software developers and OSINT reporters to investigate, design and tell data driven and visual stories.