Before his media career he was a bookseller. His passion for writing texts led him to professional journalism as a young trainee at the Swiss dispatch agency SDA. After an excursion into the alternative media world and experience as a press officer for NGOs, he began his career at SRG. He started out as a journalist and presenter at Swiss Radio International (SRI), for which he produced numerous reports after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, including an interview with Nelson Mandela. After SRI had developed into the 10-language internet platform Swissinfo, he became an online media performer and simultaneously a translator from English, French and Italian into German.