Catharina Felke

Hi, my name is Catharina Felke. I am an investigative journalist focused on working with freedom of information requests, data and doing digital research.

Currently, I'm mainly freelancing for the investigative unit at the German public broadcaster NDR. Before that, I was part of the Voter Access Team — an investigation into voter access with Columbia Journalism Investigations, USA Today and PBS Frontline — who received a 2021 George Foster Peabody Award for the documentary 'Whose Vote Counts'. In 2018, I graduated from the Lede Program for data journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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The Russian Asset Tracker

As part of an international collaboration I researched and reported on assets linked to a group of Russian oligarchs—the Navalny 35. Alexei Navalny, the jailed Russian opposition leader, had accused them of benefiting from the regime of Vladimir Putin. So far, we revealed assets worth more than $17 billion around the world. The project was initiated by the OCCRP and the Guardian, and is an ongoing investigation.

TikTok's shadowban in Germany

We revealed that TikTok has been disproportionately banning words associated with the LGBTQI community; words related to Nazism as well as the name of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai were also blocked. The company subsequently removed some of the terms discovered by our research. I talked to DW News about our findings.

Covering voter access in 2020

Published front-page investigative and enterprise stories for USA Today, and its local affiliates like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Moreover, I provided research and reporting for 'Whose Vote Counts', an award-winning documentary premiering on PBS Frontline October 20, 2020.

View project

MIKE DE SISTI / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

View more examples of my work

Deforestation in the Amazon

Showing the loss of forests in Brazil by combining satellite imagery and data from 2000 to 2013.

Long forgotten Harlem Creek

Displaying the secret stream in Harlem which makes the area prone to flooding as experienced in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy.

Unprotected and dangerous

Using open source intelligence tools like shodan to reveal the vast amount of unprotected smart devices across Germany.

The risk of unknown wells in Utah

Analyzed data to create maps showing that people with little income are more likely to live close to a possibly risky gas or oil well; schools are also affecteds.

Complex surgeries, lack of oversight

We showed how negligent quality management in German hospitals endangers patients' safety by analyzing almost 6,000 documents and confronting more than 100 hospital.

Rifts exist beyond Silicon Valley

‘I'm out of the danger zone’ – a piece about gender-based discrimination and structural problems in the technology industry in Germany (read translation).

Cash cows & innocent lambs

Parsed reports and commercial registries to show how a well-known animal welfare organization had allegedly obtained the heritage of at least two elderly persons under false pretenses.

German mediocrity

Examining gender equality in Germany I showed that little has changed since Merkel's government had taken office four years ago.

Coverage following the attack on the London Bridge

I verified and wrote a piece about the three attackers and teamed up with colleagues to explain Prime Minister Theresa May's next steps .

Live coverage of the French presidential election

I did livetickers on election night, analyzed data to see which presidential candidate was popular in Germany and translated contributions from French to German.