Team profile: Jan Michael Ihl, international project manager
Jan Michael Ihl joins Sourcefabric in Berlin as an international project manager, bringing 10 years of experience in journalism.
"A good project manager shows empathy for project partners, understanding their problems and situation," Jan Michael says. "Since we develop software for them, we need to know how they prefer to work."
At Sourcefabric, Jan Michael will work frequently with our partners in developing states. He will occasionally travel abroad to train journalists in how to use Sourcefabric tools or improve their IT literacy, drawing on his prior experience training journalists in Germany, Iraq, Kosovo and Russia.
He has started working on our projects Radio Without Borders South Caucasus and Yemen’s Women Power. He also hopes the Sourcefabric environment will help him with his coding, especially Python, which he took up recently.
Before joining Sourcefabric, Jan Michael worked as a multimedia editor and reporter for leading German news organizations. He covered such the ongoing Syrian crisis from the Turkish border in 2013 for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Leipziger Volkszeitung and UniSpiegel. For Deutsche Welle, he edited a weekly online magazine on climate issues. He also reported on nuclear waste disposal and transport in Germany.
In addition to reporting and editing, Jan Michael has managed projects at several newspapers. At Tageszeitung, he developed a social media strategy at a time when Twitter was a brand new tool, making him an early adopter of social media in news.