Josh is a reporter based in Berlin. He tracks and debunks viral disinformation for Germany’s public broadcaster Deutsche Welle using OSINT tools such as web scraping, social media analysis and geolocation. He also writes a newsletter for Nature about climate change, reaching 60,000 subscribers. You can read it here.
He came to Germany as a Fulbright journalism fellow to investigate far-right networks on Telegram. Before moving to Berlin, Josh reported on emergent tech for Bloomberg Government and the 2020 election for New Jersey’s Pulitzer-winning newspaper, The Star-Ledger.
He also worked as an Associate Producer at CNN, where he shepherded breaking news to homepages and crafted story framing for the world’s busiest news destination.
Josh began his career in the city of New Orleans, working as a digital content editor at The Advocate/Times-Picayune. In 2020, Josh graduated (virtually, thanks a lot COVID!) from Tulane University where he earned his Bachelors Degree in English, Political Economy and Jewish Studies and graduated summa cum laude. He wrote his honors thesis on the literature of New Jersey and spent most of his time in college reporting for the school newspaper, The Tulane Hullabaloo.
Josh is a lover of all things pop culture — and when he’s not reporting the news, he loves to write on eclectic topics like the photographer behind Bruce Springsteen’s album covers and a California church that worships John Coltrane as a saint.
JOSH AXELROD 