Frederik Fischer

Frederik is a classical trained television journalist. After a bachelor’s degree in Hanover, he completed a traineeship at Kobalt Productions. There he produced contributions for various public (sub-)cultural formats such as Tracks (arte), Polylux (ARD) or Kulturpalast (3sat). From an early stage, Frederik concentrated on the effects of digitalization on our society. He conducted the first interviews for German media with Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Brian Chesky (AirBnB), among others.

After his traineeship he went to Aarhus, Amsterdam, London and Washington as a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation for a double master’s degree in economics and communication science.

After his studies, he founded the data analysis company tame.it in 2011 together with Torsten Müller and Arno Dirlam - one of the first journalistic tech start-ups in Germany and one of the first start-ups to be financed mainly through crowd investing. Tame quickly grew to a team of ten developers, became a partner of Twitter and moved to the Twitter office in San Francisco as part of the German Silicon Valley Accelerator. From there, Frederik produced the first selfie documentary for arte using the smartphone alone.

In 2013 Frederik was part of the founding editorial team of Krautreporter as head of audience development. In 2015, he moves to piqd, the recommendation platform for quality journalism, as co-founder and editor-in-chief. From 2014 to 2019 Frederik Fischer was a lecturer for “Digital Journalism” at the Hamburg Media School and the University of the Arts, Berlin. Since 2014 Frederik has been co-editor of Vocer, a think tank for media innovation, where he co-initiated the Netzwende Award for sustainable innovation in journalism in 2017.

Frederik is a passionate pioneer and entrepreneur, but over the last ten years he has seen enough ambitious digital projects fail to understand the technology skepticism of many media makers. After initial enthusiasm for the new lessons from Silicon Valley, Frederik himself has become a skeptic. Innovation is indisputably vital to the survival of media companies, but Silicon Valley has proven to be a deceptive guiding star in the past. His vision: A new media policy for a new age - digital, sustainable, and oriented toward the common good.

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