Paper Trail Media is an investigative start-up based in
Munich. The editorial team, founded in 2022 by two
Pulitzer Prize winners,
Bastian Obermayer and
Frederik Obermaier, works for the news magazine
Der Spiegel,
ZDF, the Austrian daily newspaper
Der Standard and the Swiss
Tamedia group.[1] With Obermayer and Obermaier as well as the Austrian
Christo Buschek [
de], a total of three Pulitzer Prize winners work for Paper Trail Media - more than in any other European media company.
In 2023, the Paper Trail Media journalists Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, together with the Der Spiegel journalist Christoph Giesen, initiated the
Xinjiang Police Files research into the mass internment of
Uyghurs in
Xinjiang.[6] These were taken up by, among others, the
UN human rights representative
Michelle Bachelet in her criticism of the Chinese government.[7]
Vulkan Files
Paper Trail Media coordinated the
Vulkan files leak revelations together with Spiegel in 2023 .[8] More than 50 journalists - including from
The Washington Post,
The Guardian and
Le Monde - analyzed top secret data from the Russian company
NTC Vulkan, which produces software for hacking attacks and disinformation campaigns for Russian secret services.[9]
^United Nations/Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China, August 31, 2022.