My happiest times in journalism have been when I have built something new. For my latest venture, I want to help bring investigative journalism on climate and environmental issues to a much larger audience than it has reached in the past.
To do so, I’m starting a brand new newsroom focused on the environmental and climate crisis, and I’m taking my audience along for the ride. I’ll be documenting every facet of the process with an “open kitchen” approach of radical transparency, starting with a 100-day video countdown chronicling all the steps involved with starting a news organization from the ground up.
This effort combines two of the things I’m most passionate about: I love digging up stories that other people don’t want to see published, and I love creating opportunities for other journalists.
I’ve been a journalist for most of my life. I started working at age 14 for the local paper in my rural German town, turned to doing investigative stories in my early 20s, and later studied investigative journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.
When I returned from Columbia in 2014, I co-founded Germany’s first nonprofit investigative newsroom, Correctiv, a news site similar to the U.S.-based ProPublica. Later, I was hired to build BuzzFeed News in Germany, where I loved managing a scrappy team of five young journalists, and where we routinely punched above our weight. When BuzzFeed sold us to a German publishing house after about five years, and the new owner tried to suppress an explosive #MeToo investigation into German media giant Axel Springer’s top editor in Germany, I and others resigned in protest. The Springer editor got fired after we published the exposé in a different outlet. I then went on to lead a cooperative investigative initiative among the public broadcasters NDR and WDR and Germany’s major daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
From the outside, it seemed I held the perfect positions: the most prominent job in investigative journalism in Germany, and chair of the country’s association of investigative journalists, Netzwerk Recherche, an organization with more than 1,300 members. I was responsible for big investigations into famous and powerful people, and oversaw teams that produced great feature stories, documentaries, and podcasts. I got interviewed a lot, and even wrote a book. And each summer, we organized the largest journalism conference in Germany.
And yet, something was not quite right. As I watched my two children transition from toddlers into young people, I started to think more and more about the environmental and climate crisis in the world they were growing up in — and the stark lack of coverage about it in German media. Although I tried to push for more climate-related investigations, I often ran into too much red tape or obstacles to feel I was really contributing to changing something.
I thought: This is such a big problem, and such a big opportunity, someone will surely start a German newsroom focused on the environment and climate this year. But no one ever did...
With each passing year I thought: This is such a big problem, and such a big opportunity, someone will surely start a German newsroom focused on the environment and climate this year. But no one ever did, at least not in the way I thought was needed. Instead, I noticed coverage decreasing. Established outlets shut down, projects ran out of money, and reporters admitted to me they had started to avoid using the word “climate” when pitching stories. Meanwhile, the crisis itself continued to intensify, with floods, droughts, record temperatures, melting glaciers, species becoming extinct, and political rollbacks of environmental protections. I decided that I would need to be the one to make a move — and start something from scratch.
So, I quit my big job and in 2025 began a year at Harvard University as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. I took classes on the environment as well as at the business school, where I learned how to craft a business model that would have impact and still make money. And last spring I honed the pitch for my new newsroom and secured enough money from foundations to finance my work for a few months.
On Oct. 6, I’m starting a membership campaign for my new newsroom, called Otter News. I’m trying to sign up at least 3,000 paying members (at 8 euros, about $9, a month) within the first 100 days in order to make Otter News a reality in 2027. And I’m not just doing a membership campaign, I’m building the newsroom in public, taking people with me on the journey to create a new media company before it even exists. I plan to do so by documenting the process with 100 videos in 100 days that will include all the steps viewers rarely get to see: from going to the notary to legally establish the business, to posting the first job ad for my very first employee. When I start my first investigation, there will be a video before I even begin to investigate, and I’ll announce the company I’ll be looking into and my investigative hypothesis as well.
I chose an animal name (“otter” is the same in German and English) to be clear that this is a newsroom about nature, the environment, and a livable future. Otters were nearly extinct in Germany a few decades ago but have reestablished themselves in many parts of the country, helped by environmental protection measures. Otter News will aim to bring together the strength of investigative reporting with the methodology of the creator economy: building a loyal audience by being authentic, transparent, and sometimes a bit raw.
My wife, Sanaz Saleh-Ebrahimi, an award-winning journalist, started building social media channels two years ago that now have hundreds of thousands of followers. She now teaches others how to use social media tools for successful community building. Her work has inspired me to rethink how investigative journalism is presented on the internet, and to try the open kitchen approach, which is rooted in radical transparency. Not only will I aim to publish 100 videos in 100 days about every incremental step in the process of building this newsroom, but I also want to incorporate it into our daily work routine, once Otter News has enough supporters to get up and running for real.
So, now is the best time to join us, if you want to be a founding member of a compelling news site devoted to environmental issues. You have the rare chance to see Otter News being built, step-by-step, in public, for the public.
