Simon Wörpel

Investigative Data Journalist

• More about my work

contact

• [email protected]
• https://simonwoerpel.de
• https://github.com/simonwoerpel
• verified identities: https://keybase.io/simonwoerpel

abstract

please feel free to use these bio snippets, e.g. for your conference programme or whatever.

english

Simon Wörpel is an independent investigative data journalist, researcher and leak librarian. He specializes in documents processing, data engineering and data analysis for journalistic investigations. Simon works for different non-profit organizations, newspapers and media outlets in germany. There he advises and implements software tools for research teams to enable data mining, documents processing and data analysis to enable data-driven investigative journalism.

From 2015 to 2019 he worked as a data journalist and newsroom developer at the german non-profit investigative newsroom CORRECTIV. There he built document databases and security infrastructure for collaborative cross-border investigations like “The CumEx Files” and “Grand Theft Europe”. Both of these projects involved dealing with highly sensitive material and orchestrating secure communication and data sharing between dozens of journalists from different countries.

Simon originally attended journalism school and studied economics and politics in cologne, germany.

german

Simon Wörpel ist unabhängiger investigativer Datenjournalist, Rechercheut und Leak-Bibliothekar. Er ist spezialisiert auf Dokumenten- und Datenverarbeitung und Analyse für journalistische Recherchen, und arbeitet für verschiedene Redaktionen und Organisationen. Dort berät und implementiert er technische Lösungen für Rechercheteams, die kollaborativen datengetriebenen Investigativjournalismus ermöglichen.

Simon war bis Mitte 2019 investigativer Datenjournalist beim gemeinnützigen Recherchezentrum CORRECTIV. Dort baute er zuletzt Dokumenten-Datenbanken und Sicherheits-Infrastruktur für die europaweiten Recherchen “Grand Theft Europe” und “CumEx Files”.

Ursprünglich hat Simon in Köln Journalismus, Volkswirtschaftslehre und Politik studiert und als freier Journalist und Web-Entwickler gearbeitet.

misc

His work at CORRECTIV was awarded with the Grimme Online Award (2019), the Helmut Schmidt Journalistenpreis (2019), the Otto Brenner Preis für kritischen Journalismus (2019), and the Reporterpreis (2016) as well as nominated (2017, 2020) for the Nannen Preis. In 2018, the CORRECTIV-Team was “Team des Jahres” (Platz 3) of medium magazin, and one year before Simon was mentioned in the list of 30 young journalism talents (“Top 30 bis 30 Talente”) by this magazine.

Simon has already received project funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (as part of the "Prototype Fund"), the Babelsberg Media Innovation Center, the Mercator Foundation (as part of the "Cartographers - Mercator Scholarship Program for Journalists" by Fleiß und Mut e.V.), the Schöpflin Foundation (as part of the "Grow Scholarship for Nonprofit Journalism" by Netzwerk Recherche e.V.) and the IJ4EU (Investigative Journalism for Europe) Fund.