USA Fellowship for Journalists
 : And the winners are ...


Intro: taz panterfoundation | [Deutsche Version hier] The jury has made its decision – for the third time, ten journalists have been selected for the Daniel Haufler Fellowship “Journey into the Media Society USA”, organized by the taz Panter Foundation. Congratulations!

From September 27 to October 19, the fellows will travel to the USA (more information about the fellowship can be found here). The trip will take the fellows from Washington, DC to Philadelphia and finally to New York. Here, we briefly introduce the ten journalists:

Alexandra Duong | Alexandra is a freelance reporter. Her main focus is on the environment and health, but she is also interested in agriculture, consumer protection, and technology. She studied history and economics in Mannheim and environmental policy in London. In Hamburg, she attended the Henri Nannen School, where she specialized in video journalism alongside writing. She now also enjoys working in radio. She lives in Paris.

Lea Ernst | Lea from Zurich worked her way through various jobs before ending up in freelance journalism. For an online gift shop, she promoted beer socks and love locks, typed job applications for complete strangers in a dimly lit office in Bochum, and documented the work of an NGO in Sri Lanka. For the past five years, she has written and photographed social and international features, among others for ZEIT Magazin, NZZ am Sonntag Magazin, ZEIT Verbrechen, and WOZ. For a report on mink killings in Denmark, she won the Swiss Press Photo Award; for a story from a former cinema in Sarajevo, she received the Zurich Journalism Prize (Newcomer).


Ruth Fuentes | Ruth, born in 1995 in Kaiserslautern and raised between German and Spanish culture, was a taz Panter trainee until January 2023. Before that, she studied mathematics in Madrid and Heidelberg. Today, she lives and works as a freelance journalist in Berlin. Since 2022, she has written, among other things, the taz FUTURZWEI column “Voice of My Generation.” She is a member of the Berlin reading stage “Neuköllner Brett.”


Veronica Frenzel | Veronica works as a freelance reporter, mainly for print media, often from the African continent. She is particularly interested in the entanglement of individual biography and historical responsibility. In her book “In eurem Schatten beginnt mein Tag,” she explored the consequences of her family’s Nazi past on her own life. As part of the Daniel Haufler Fellowship, she is researching conflicts surrounding Indigenous identity. Starting from these disputes, she asks how colonial continuities manifest themselves in everyday life, institutions, and individual biographies, and how genuine forms of social responsibility can emerge.


Eva Hoffmann | Eva is a freelance investigative journalist focusing on institutional failure, abuse of power, and sexualized violence. In Freiburg, Vienna, and Paris, she studied media and cultural anthropology, concentrating particularly on surveillance and authoritarian systems. Eva is co-founder of the Selbstlaut Collective, an association of freelance journalists and photographers carrying out international and power-critical investigations together. Most recently, together with Christian Fuchs at ZEIT, she uncovered a dating platform for neo-Nazis, reported for rbb on the exploitation of Vietnamese care workers, and investigated abuse of power and assaults during youth trips for ZDF.


Cristina Marina | Cristina was born in Bucharest, Romania. In 2000, she came to Germany as an Erasmus student. She earned a degree in physics from the University of Hanover and later a Master of Arts in East European Studies from FU Berlin. She began her journalism career in 2017 with training at the Freie Journalistenschule (FJS). This was followed by positions at Süddeutsche Zeitung and a traineeship at Evangelischer Pressedienst (epd). Since 2021, she has been an editor in the Berlin section of Tagesspiegel. She enjoys writing about social issues and extraordinary human stories.


Johanna Sagmeister | Johanna is a cross-media journalist in Berlin. Among other things, she works as a reporter for Tagesschau and rbb24 Inforadio. She also produces TV documentaries and features, for example about homelessness in Berlin (rbb) or the real estate market (ARD Story). For the documentary series “Chronik einer Abschiebung,” she was nominated in 2025 for the German Reporter Prize in the podcast category. Previously, she worked as an editor and news editor at ZDFheute and ARD-Mittagsmagazin. She has reported from Turkey, Iraq, and Pakistan, among other places. She lived in the USA as a high school student and interned at the United Nations in New York during her studies. She completed her training at the German School of Journalism in Munich.


Fabian Schroer | Fabian studied English literature and philosophy in Essen and literature in Berlin. Since 2022, he has worked at taz: first in culture and social media, and since 2024 as an editor in the foreign affairs department, currently responsible for Southern and Western Europe. Fabian Schroer writes about migration, social media, and the political influence of Big Tech. He especially enjoys writing about freedom in his biweekly column “Freidrehen.” He is also one of the hosts of Fernverbindung, the taz foreign affairs podcast. In September 2025, he accompanied the crew of Sea-Watch 5 during their mission in the Mediterranean.


Finn Starken | Finn currently works as a freelance journalist for Norddeutscher Rundfunk. He studied history, philosophy, and political theory at Heidelberg University and Goethe University Frankfurt. He then completed a traineeship at ZDF Magazin Royale, where he later worked as an editor. Other positions included Spiegel, Deutschlandfunk, and taz. Most recently, he was an IJP fellow at Vrij Nederland in Amsterdam. Finn lives in Cologne.


Simon Wörz | Simon has worked in journalism since his school days – first as a local football league reporter in the Swabian Jura, today among other things as an investigative reporter for Bayerischer Rundfunk. He studied in Stuttgart, Seville, Munich, and Mexico City, and trained at the German School of Journalism. In Bavaria, he researched, among other topics, far-right incidents and queer-hostile sex education in schools. For the ARD documentary “Attack on Amateur Football – The Greed of the Betting Industry,” he received the Special Investigation Award at the 2024 AIPS Sports Media Awards. Simon is part of the podcast collective “Lagune 11,” which produces storytelling and documentary podcasts, for example for the BR format “Seelenfänger,” dealing with cult-like movements.


You can find more background on the Daniel Haufler Fellowship at the taz Panter Foundation here. Information about the taz Panter Foundation traineeship can be found here.