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Personality in Residence: Roger de Weck

April 20 to 22
Journalist, author and economist

Roger de Weck is an author based in Zurich and a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. He was a member of the Future Council for Reforms at ARD, ZDF and Deutschlandfunk, Director General of SRG, Editor-in-Chief of Die Zeit and Tages-Anzeiger, Chairman of the Board of the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and presenter of Sternstunden Philosophie.

Raised bilingually in Fribourg, he studied economics with a focus on economic history at the University of St.Gallen and began his career in journalism at the Tribune de Genève. In 2022, he published Die Kraft der Demokratie – Eine Antwort auf die autoritären Reaktionäre with Suhrkamp. In 2024, he published his latest book Das Prinzip Trotzdem – Warum wir den Journalismus vor den Medien retten müssen.

Roger de Weck sits on the advisory board of the St.Gallen Collegium at the University of St.Gallen, on the scientific advisory board of the journal Critique Internationale (SciencesPo Paris), the Board of Trustees of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen and the Board of SOS Méditerranée (sea rescue ship Ocean Viking). De Weck holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Fribourg and Lucerne.

The events are free and open to the public. The detailed programme and link to register will follow.

Programme

What kind of journalism do we want today?

Panel discussion with Roger de Weck, Noemi Heule (St.Galler Tagblatt), Eric Gujer (NZZ) and Valeria Jenni (PRISMA)

6:15 pm, SQUARE Stage, 2nd floor

Although the Halbierungsinitiative was rejected in Switzerland, the debate has brought a fundamental question back into focus: what kind of journalism do we actually want today? Caught between political pressure, economic challenges and the rapid transformation of the digital public sphere, journalism faces crucial decisions. What role should the media play in democracy? What expectations does the younger generation have of journalism?

Registration

Public Course: How Datafication, Surveillance and AI are Changing Media 

Contextual Studies, BA, Lecture title: News in the age of synthetic media and distrust

4:15 to 6 pm, SQUARE Residency Grid

Teacher: Dr. Philip Di Salvo, Guest speaker: Roger de Weck
Language: English

Journalism has been entangled in successive phases of digitalization and datafication, navigating major transformations from the rise of social media to the current moment of generative AI pervasiveness. Throughout this process, the field has benefited directly from digital innovation while simultaneously being forced to contend with increasingly complex scenarios, deepening power imbalances, and a progressive erosion of its central role in society.

Generative AI, with its epistemic capacities, can be understood as the most powerful accelerator of these dynamics to date, once again reshaping how news is produced, performed, and distributed, while for the first time confronting journalists with technological actors capable of generating content that mimics human language at scale.

How can journalism navigate this conjuncture and respond to these new pressures while maintaining audience trust and loyalty to its own mission, at a moment when access to reliable, trustworthy, and diverse news has never been more important? We will discuss these issues with Roger de Weck, a journalist and media manager with extensive experience in the European and Swiss news industry, both from the perspective of editorial leadership and reporting.

Registration

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