Alexandra Borchardt is an experienced journalist, book author, keynote speaker and media adviser. She is a consultant for the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. As their Director of Leadership Programmes she developed and led on courses for senior journalists and media managers. Prior to this she was managing editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Germany’s leading quality daily.

Alexandra teaches “Leadership and Strategy in the 21st Century” at TU Munich and “Journalism” at the University of the Arts in Berlin, gives lectures and keynotes on digitisation and the media and regularly publishes commentaries and essays, for example with Project Syndicate, European Journalism Observatory and ada, a German magazine for digital life. She is the author of Mensch 4.0 – Frei bleiben in einer digitalen Welt (Freedom in a digital world), Random House, 2018. She served as vice chair on the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Quality Journalism in the Digital Age.

At SZ she held several functions in the politics and business sections. She was also founding editor of Süddeutsche’s Plan W, an award-winning quarterly magazine for women and business. In her reporting she has focused on internet and democracy and the future of work. In 2015 she published Das Internet zwischen Diktatur und Anarchie: Zehn Thesen zur Demokratisierung der digitalen Welt (The Internet between Dictatorship and Anarchy: Ten Assertions about Democracy in the Digital World), Süddeutsche Zeitung Edition Streitschrift. Before joining SZ she worked for Financial Times Deutschland and Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

Alexandra holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Tulane University, New Orleans (1994), and in 2013 completed a Programme for Management Development at IESE Business School, Barcelona. She lives outside of Munich with her husband and two teenage children.

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