Lenz Jacobsen is a journalist and has been an editor at ZEIT ONLINE since 2012. He studied economics, politics and sociology in Cologne and Istanbul. From 2017 to 2019, he was head of the politics, economy and society department there. Since then, he has reported mainly on issues concerning the state of democracy. Jacobsen has reported on the Gezi protests in Istanbul, on Pegida in Dresden, on refugee policy in Lesbos, Idomeni, Brussels and Berlin. Most recently, he has repeatedly written about citizens’ councils and other democratic innovations and commented on domestic political events.
In 2016, he was “journalist in residence” at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), where he worked on problems of legitimacy in established democracies. He has won the “Medienpreis vielfältige Demokratie” (2021), the “Reporterpreis” (2016, in the team), and was counted among the “Top 30 under 30” by Medium magazine (2012, in the team).