About Me

My name is Fabian A. Scherschel, but please call me Fab. I live and work as a journalist and writer in Düsseldorf, Germany. I have been recording podcasts since 2006 and got my first job as a full-time professional journalist in 2012. For more than five years, I worked as an editor for the German publishing company Heise, writing news stories and feature articles in German. Previously, I worked for a subsidiary of the same company in London where I wrote English language news articles, as well as translating other people’s content from German to English. Since January 2019, I have worked as a freelance journalist.

You can hire me to write news and to produce long form written content, as well as podcasts, in English and German. I can also translate text between those languages, have been on TV and radio as an expert on tech matters and have given talks and hosted workshops as well as entire conferences. Additionally, I have designed logos, created corporate identities and developed websites.

I was born in Duisburg, Germany in 1983 and went to school there. In 2000 and 2001 I moved to Gympie, Australia for a year and completed my Autralian high school diploma. I graduated from the German equivalent of high school two years later. After school, I moved to Bonn to go on to university and study English, Modern History and Politics. In 2005, I spent another couple of months traveling Australia and living in Airlie Beach. I never completed my MA at Bonn University. Instead, in 2012, I accepted my first full-time job as a content editor for the now-defunct tech news site The H. I moved to London in the same year.

In 2013 The H was closed down by its parent company Heise Media for business reasons. I interviewed with Heise in Hanover and was hired as an editor at c’t magazine and heise online . Due to my wife’s career, I moved to Hamburg in the summer of 2017 and to Düsseldorf in 2020. I have been living in Düsseldorf-Oberbilk ever since.

You can find various examples of stories I’ve written previously on my blog.

Contact

If you want to get in contact with me about this website, because you want to hire me for a job or because you want to send me information for a story, you have several options. The easiest and direct way is to email me:

contact@fab.industries
PGP Key: AF4D8080F2F3982E

PLEASE BE ADVISED:

I do not appreciate being put on mailing lists (PR lists or otherwise) without my express consent. The above email address is only to be used for correspondence addressed to me personally – e.g. feedback to something I wrote, a story you want me to cover or if you want to hire me. Do not send me any kind of unsolicited business offers or advertisements. If you want to put me on a PR list, ask first.

I take my job as a journalist very seriously. That means I will not publish “guest posts” or articles you’ve written. I will not put advertising in my articles (hidden or in plain sight) and my audience is not for sale.

NON-COMPLIANCE WITH THESE RULES WILL LEAD TO YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS (OR YOUR WHOLE DOMAIN) BEING PERMANENTLY BLACKLISTED WITHOUT WARNING.

Postal Address

You can send documents and letters to the following PO box:

Fabian A. Scherschel
FAB INDUSTRIES
Postfach 10 23 04
40014 Düsseldorf
GERMANY

My VAT identification number: DE322313341

Secure Contact Form for Whistleblowers

I maintain a secure end-to-end encrypted contact form that you can use to send me information and documents anonymously. If you want to know more about the system, what technology I am using and why I created it, please read this blog post. It also explains some basic security precautions you should probably keep in mind.

→ Secure Contact Form

Do not endanger yourself. I appreciate the courage of all whistleblowers but your safety should always come first. Use common sense, practice basic operational security and always try to provide for plausible deniability.

The Forum

I maintain a forum where users of my websites can comment on the content I create and also talk amongst themselves about other things they find interesting. Some of my articles will have links to topics on this forum to encourage discussion. You can visit the forum directly by going to forum.fab.industries.

Please keep the privacy notice and the terms of service for this forum in mind.

About This Site

This is the personal website of Fabian A. Scherschel, a freelance journalist and podcaster from Düsseldorf. Here, I write about my work and the things I care about beyond work.

This site is static and running without server-side scripts. It has no comments section and no way for visitors to interact with it. This is by design. Aside from creating a fast and safe experience for everyone, this also means I respect your privacy. This site is not tracking you. The only trace your visit to this server leaves is in the logs of my hosting provider Netlify. This data is stored for 30 days.

I sometimes embed third party scripts from YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Spotify or Datawrapper. This is done for your convenience. Please use the provided links to inform yourself about these companies and how they use the data they collect about you. If you do not want these embeds to affect you, please use the mechanisms built into your browser or a script blocker like the Privacy Badger from the EFF.

Copyright Notice

I am willing to license most of my content for use by others under a Creative Commons license upon request. Because some of the things I post might have been covered under different licenses or contractual obligations, e.g. because the content stems from work I did for others as a freelancer, I need to check first, however. Therefore, I ask that you contact me ahead of re-publishing anything you find on this site. I will do my utmost to quickly address your inquiry.