Civic Journalism Fellowship

The Allianz Foundation and Publix, the new house for journalism and the public sphere, are joining forces to support promising actors in journalism for the common good. As part of the cooperation, the Kurdish journalist and political scientist Nalan Sipar is being funded as the first "Civic Journalism Fellow" this year. Since May 2024, she and the team from the digital publishing house MedyaN, which she founded, have been using the workspaces and studio infrastructure at Publix in Berlin Neukölln. Over the next twelve months, Sipar will be working on various formats aimed at increasing diversity in the German media landscape.

“38 percent of under-20s in Germany have a migration background. They want new formats. With our community journalism, we are filling a gap and making the future of journalism more diverse. We are the medium of the diverse society. We come from the community and do journalism on behalf of the community, in the interests of society as a whole,” says Nalan Sipar, describing her work.

At the age of 15, Sipar came to Germany from Turkey and built a successful career in journalism. She worked for WDR, Deutschlandfunk, Deutsche Welle and SPIEGEL, hosted Germany's first German-Turkish children's program “Kelebek”, developed successful You-Tube formats and was awarded the prize for the best start-up idea by the German Journalists' Association in 2022. In November 2023, she founded the digital publishing house MedyaN, which specializes in non-profit, German-Turkish journalism. From September 2024, Sipar will be researching diversity in the German media landscape as a fellow of the renowned John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University in California.

Photo: © Manuel Krug