As a freelancer - I'm 15 and consider riding a scooter totally cool - my father drives me in his dark blue Ford from appointment to appointment across the flat part of the Soester Börde. While he waits in the car, I make my first journalistic experiences in the local clubhouses of poultry farmers and carnivalists.

At 19, an experimental phase begins: I now drive myself, I study German, English and history in Bielefeld and switch from daily newspaper to magazine, from club reporting to culture. For someone who first reads the horoscopes in the TV guide Prisma, disenchantment comes in my early 20s: during an internship at a TV magazine I predict the future - four times love, four times health, four times career, please!

Things get more serious in my mid-20s: I work for Westfalen-Blatt, a daily newspaper in East Westphalia's upper centre. Politics, business, culture - it's full days and full pages. Until, yes, until it goes to the provinces: Bockhorst, Kohlstädt, Niederntudorf. I find myself at folk festivals, in the meat factory, on the edge of the football pitch of the district league A club. The days are fuller, the summer holes longer. 

It is the time when I understand the importance of local journalism: Every day I experience the realities of my readers' lives. I make their experiences. I am an agent of the citizens, but at the same time I ask question. In this highly individualised society, local journalism speaks to everyone, regardless of educational background or profession. The journalist Ernst Elitz once so aptly said: "The regional newspaper is the last medium of integration".

I also experience a direct line to readers in online journalism. In my mid-30s, I become part of a young team: we are creative, we are fast, we get clicks. I learn something new every day, produce videos, write texts for the socials, engage with the community.

Then the big city calls: in 2019 I leave Bielefeld and go to Berlin, away from the daily newspaper, into the museum. I'm part of the team when Futurium opens its doors in autumn 2019. The website of the House of the Future is my new playground. The topics are scientific and - you guessed it - about the future, about dining in virtual reality, the morality of machines, mobility in the age of the frontier and New Work.

I am now implementing my very personal concept of modern work here - as a part time freelancer with a focus on political and social topics, personal stories, interviews and portraits. And as co-editor of a book about the war in Ukraine.