Laura Meschede

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Laura Meschede (born 1994) is a German journalist who became known for socially critical and multimedia reports . Her main topics are politics, society and digitization.

Life

Laura Meschede completed an apprenticeship at the German School of Journalism in Munich. Since 2014 she has been writing as a freelance journalist, reporter and author for print and online editions of various daily newspapers such as taz , Die Zeit , FAZ or Süddeutsche Zeitung . She is also studying political science and economics at the LMU Munich (as of 2018).

Reports

“No place” is the title of a multimedia online report by Laura Meschede on taz.de about the life of Roma families in Macedonia . In 2016 she was awarded the Otto Brenner Prize for critical journalism in the “Newcomer” category. Meschede understands "stylish digital storytelling and explaining and moves so often discriminated population group in the middle of our attention: modern and serious and without gravity", so the jury. After their announcement that they would donate the 2,000 euros in prize money to the family with whom they had lived for three months, both the Otto Brenner Foundation and the IG Metall union decided to make donations in the same amount and presented them symbolically at the award ceremony Checks. The laudation was given by Sonia Seymour Mikich . The report was nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2017 .

Meschede used the method of investigative journalism to research her report “Die Mensch-Maschine” published in SZ-Magazin . For three weeks she worked undercover as a “click worker” on the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk , on which around half a million people worldwide, mainly from low-wage countries , compete for small digital orders. For just a few cents, they do monotonous tasks that are still too complex for machines and evaluate images or type receipts. Meschede reported about poor pay, lack of rights, high competitive pressure and loneliness. According to her own statements, she would not have been able to write “The Man-Machine” without a scholarship.

Surprisingly, in 2018 she turned down the Helmut Schmidt Journalist Prize from the ING-DiBa bank endowed with 5000 euros , which she had been awarded for the report. She justified her rejection in a speech during the award ceremony she called a PR event. She could not accept the bank-financed award if she was to continue to be credible as a journalist. Here is an excerpt from her speech:

“When I look into the future, I'm scared. Don't be afraid that something will change. But fear that everything will stay as it is. […] In times when everything is actually increasing except real wages; in which Jeff Bezos earns 1.3 times as much per minute as an Amazon employee in the whole year and in which the only security we have is that in old age the money will not be enough for us - in times like this there is no longer an option to sit quietly. [...] And that's why I'm here to do PR. But not for the Ing-Diba. But for the thought that there is an alternative to how the world is now. "

- Laura Meschede : quoted in: Blätter für German and international politics , September 2018

For this report, she received the Willi Bleicher Prize, endowed with 2000 euros, in the young talent category in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Henri Nannen Prize in 2019 .

Political commitment

In October 2018, Meschede and other members of the Munich noPAG alliance filed a constitutional complaint against the controversial tightening of the Bavarian Police Task Act (PAG) .

Awards

  • 2016 Otto Brenner Prize
  • 2018 Helmut Schmidt Journalist Prize (not accepted)
  • 2018 Willi Bleicher Prize in the young talent category

Publications (selection)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Laura Meschede, Zeit Online
  2. ↑ Otto Brenner Prize: Multimediale taz report awarded , Taz house blog, October 10, 2016
  3. ↑ Otto Brenner Prize - Newcomer Prize 2016
  4. ↑ Grimme Online Award 2017, nominees
  5. ↑ Daniel Goffart : The end of the middle class. Farewell to a successful German model , Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-8270-1396-5 , pp. 164–167
  6. ↑ a b Helmut Schmidt Journalist Prize. "This is a PR event" . Laura Meschede in conversation with Michael Borgers, Deutschlandfunk, October 1, 2018
  7. ↑ "If everything stays as it is, the future will hit us very hard." Speech by journalist Laura Meschede on the rejection of the Helmut Schmidt Journalist Prize, September 27, 2018, in: Blätter für German and international politics
  8. ↑ willi-bleicher-preis.de: winner Laura Meschede
  9. ↑ Henri Nannen Prize 2019 (pdf)
  10. ^ Christian Rath, Bavarian Police Task Act - The next constitutional complaint in taz.de of October 5, 2018, accessed on November 4, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Meschede, Laura
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1994