Transatlantic Perspectives on Journalism

Lorraine Ali is television critic of the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was a senior writer for the Calendar section where she covered culture at large, entertainment and American Muslim issues. Ali is an award-winning journalist and Los Angeles native who has written in publications ranging from the New York Times to Rolling Stone and GQ. She was formerly The Times’ music editor and before that, a senior writer and music critic with Newsweek magazine. Her writing awards include Best Online Feature from the New York Association of Black Journalists in 2007, an Excellence in Journalism Award in 2002 from the National Arab Journalists Association. In 1996, she won Best National Feature Story honors at the Music Journalism Awards.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, covering Southern California everything and a bunch of the West and beyond. He was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and the Mike Royko Award for Commentary and Column Writing and was part of the team that won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News for reporting on a leaked audio recording that upended Los Angeles politics. Arellano previously worked at OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for 15 years and editor for six, wrote a column called ¡Ask a Mexican! and is the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.” He’s the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.

Susanne Beyer studied German literature, history and journalism in Bamberg and Vienna. After her vocational training at Deutsche Journalistenschule (DJS), she initially worked as a culture editor at SPIEGEL, a German weekly news magazine and one of the largest such publications in Europe, where she was deputy head of department. She was deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL for four years, then worked as a journalist in SPIEGEL's Berlin office and now writes for the editorial team. Alongside her job, Susanne Beyer is currently training to become a mediator. Beyer is a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Cordula Meyer, born in 1971, has been deputy editor-in-chief of SPIEGEL, Germanys leading political website und magazin, since 2024. She studied political science and communication in Hamburg and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, graduating with an M.A. She has worked at SPIEGEL since 1999, initially as a reporter at the National Desk and later as a correspondent in Washington, covering the election and presidency of Barack Obama. She became the head of the National Desk in 2015. In 2023, she became a member of SPIEGEL's editorial desk. As a reporter she has covered how 9/11 was planned in Hamburg and the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. She has been involved in volunteer work with Netzwerk Recherche, an organization promoting investigative reporting, for many years.

Heinrich Wefing is a multi-award-winning journalist, architecture critic and book author. After many years at the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) as cultural correspondent in Berlin, and West Coast correspondent in San Francisco, he moved to DIE ZEIT in 2008, a major German national weekly newspaper. Since 2018, he has headed the politics department there. Wefing is one of the initiators of the Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights of the European Union, which was published at the end of November 2016.