Lost in Munich, found in writing

Unfortunately, the time has come to say goodbye to Munich, but first I want to look back and think about what this semester has left on me. Writing this feels a bit like the final step of the design thinking process I learned at Media Lab Bayern: after weeks of collecting impressions, testing ideas and reflecting on what I saw, it’s time to present the finished product. So let me take you through it.

Looking back

We started this journey visiting radio LORA. It was our very first fieldtrip, and back then we were still confused about finding our way around Munich. But LORA taught us something I didn’t expect: that it is okay to feel lost, as long as you keep your real goal in mind. They showed us that you don’t need much to pursue what you believe in, whether that’s justice, being heard, or simply telling the stories nobody else tells. You just start, even with nothing, and something eventually comes out of it. LORA itself has always been a bet, and in many ways it still is, but that has never stopped them from doing what they care about: giving a voice to the unheard. The way they have kept renewing their FM frequency over and over, against the odds and the competitors, says everything about how much they mean it.  

Mediaschool Bayern got me hyped, because it showed me how cool learning journalism can actually be. It’s a wonderful place, and what I appreciated most is that you’re allowed to fail here. You get to find out what you really like about journalism, and whether the job is truly for you, instead of just studying it and assuming it will be your path even though you’ve never actually tried it. Mediaschool Bayern, and whoever decided to fund it, clearly understood how important it is to invest in new generations, giving them the space and the tools to figure themselves out. 

Now let’s move to the latest two trips of our semester.

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Going behind the scenes at Süddeutsche Zeitung felt like living a dream. After hearing the story of the newspaper and seeing some old editions, campaigns and printing techniques, we finally reached the place where the magic happens: where the paper everyone will pick up at the newsstand the next morning actually gets made.

Watching how much care and how many steps go into producing a single edition, I don’t think I’ll ever look at a newspaper the same way again, or at least I won’t, since I’m a hopeless romantic when it comes to print media. In fact, I was so excited when, at the very end of the visit, we were each handed a copy of the next day’s edition. Nobody else in Germany had that paper yet. Holding tomorrow’s news in my hands felt oddly special, almost like being let in on a secret a few hours early.

Setting the magic aside for a moment, what surprised me the most was learning that Süddeutsche Zeitung’s presses also print several of its direct competitors: Frankfurter Allgemeine, Die Welt, Bild, and others. On one hand, it makes sense logistically, printing infrastructure is expensive, so sharing it is efficient. On the other hand, it left me with a question I couldn’t quite shake: how much trust does that require? If you’re printing tomorrow’s edition of a competing newspaper today, what stops you from adjusting your own coverage based on what you see coming off the machines? It made me realize that the media landscape runs on layers of trust and cooperation that are completely invisible to readers.

Media Lab Bayern

If at Süddeutsche Zeitung you can feel the tradition, at Media Lab Bayern you get to see what it looks like to build something from nothing. 

A young woman from the team welcomed us and explained what Media Lab actually does. It’s a publicly funded initiative, supported by the Bavarian government, because a strong, innovative media sector is seen as good for the region’s industry as a whole. It has two locations, Munich and Ansbach, and its main target group is journalists and media professionals who want to build something new. Startups and individuals come to Media Lab not with a fully formed company, but with a prototype and an idea, one that has to have a real impact on society, not just a good business case. If Media Lab believes in it, they fund and mentor the founders through the process. Two projects she mentioned stuck with me in particular: a karaoke-style subtitling feature for a local station called RadioZeit, and an AI-based project working to reduce online hate speech. 

After the presentation, she gave us a tour of the space, and I noticed another group on the other side of the office, deep in their own workshop. It made the whole place feel less like an office and more like a workshop factory running non-stop.

Then it was our turn. Before starting, she introduced us to design thinking, the method structuring the whole session, and walked us through its stages. We were given four possible challenges to choose from. We picked the one about creating a ten-minute podcast for students at a local station.

As design thinking demands, we didn’t start with ideas but with needs. We tried to understand how our audience, students like us, actually consumes media: how they stay informed, how they engage, what frustrates them. We wrote everything on post-its and clustered them on the wall into macro-themes. Only after mapping out these needs did we move on to individual ideation, each of us splitting a sheet of paper into four quadrants and sketching out concepts. One of my ideas, for instance, was a podcast series where university professors summarize their course material, something students could listen to before exams.

When we came back together, every idea in the room was genuinely interesting, but the one we chose to develop was inspired by Pokémon Go: an app where users walk around the city and unlock podcast episodes tied to specific locations, stories, local facts, or insider tips. Just like with the Pokémon app, you’d have to physically go to a location to unlock its episode, and you could also see if other users happened to be at the same spot. From there we moved into prototyping, sketching a phone screen on paper to show what the app would actually look and feel like, almost like a quick hand-drawn Figma mockup. Finally, each group presented their concept to the room.

It was fascinating to work with design thinking and see how many processes, ideas and solutions can come together in your mind in just a few minutes. It also taught me something about teamwork itself: the balance between working alone and working together, and how much each one needs the other.

Looking at all four fieldtrips together, I realize how different they all were, and how much that diversity let us see across the entire sector, from a volunteer-run radio station to a publicly funded innovation lab. In the end, tradition and innovation aren’t really opposites. Süddeutsche Zeitung protects what already works, while Media Lab Bayern builds what doesn’t exist yet, but both are, in their own way, trying to stay relevant to people whose habits keep changing.

Future of media and journalism 

After all these different fieldtrips, this is where I’ve landed. I do believe in the future of journalism. No matter how advanced AI becomes, it can’t replace a journalist’s critical thinking, and in a time of constant information overload, we need that critical eye more than ever. At the same time, I don’t think the profession can just ignore AI and keep working exactly as it always has. The next generation of journalists will grow up alongside these tools, and the job will need to be redefined around that reality, not in spite of it. The future of media won’t be built by choosing between tradition and innovation. It will be built by people willing to sit with a problem long enough to actually understand it.

What will remain from Munich?

I’m writing the end of my last post, and I’m so sad about it. I kept postponing this post, because writing it would mean admitting that my time here is running out. 

It was stunning to immerse myself in a different culture and study communication from a different perspective. What excited me most, especially in this course, was being able to study journalism in a way my home university simply doesn’t offer. This course let me see journalism up close, in all its different shapes, instead of only as an abstract concept in a textbook. I leave with a much clearer sense of how many different institutions, community, educational, industrial, and entrepreneurial, all have to work together to keep a media ecosystem healthy.

Munich, LMU, you will always have a place in my heart. I’ll always be grateful, because here I finally found again the joy and the desire to write that I had lost somewhere along the way.