Florian Danner

Florian Danner is co-anchor of Austria’s first national morning television show on ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 and creator of Wahlwandern (“election hiking”). He grew up in a small village six miles from the Iron Curtain, where fences were fact, not metaphor. It gave him an early sense of distance, and of what it means to feel left out by the news.

After his 2016 Arthur F. Burns Fellowship at NBC in New York, he created Wahlwandern, a reporting format that has taken him over 2,000 miles on foot through small towns in Austria, rural Europe and the United States. Covering six U.S. presidential elections on the ground and reporting from Afghanistan to the Vatican, he kept hearing the same line: the news isn't made for people like us.

At the inaugural AI Media Academy in Vienna, he began building and testing prototypes to explore how AI can help make journalism more relatable and worth returning to.

Danner holds a master’s in international relations from the University of Leicester, was a CNN exchange fellow, teaches digital storytelling at Johannes Kepler University and volunteers in schools teaching media literacy.