He started to write about technology at the Austrian business magazine “Trend” while still in high school. After receiving a master’s degree in neurobiology from the University of Munich, he was a science writer at the major German daily newspaper “Sueddeutsche Zeitung.” There, he became the environment editor on the politics desk and was later promoted to be responsible for the “topic of the day” as Page 2 editor. In 2012, Kotynek joined Germany’s largest weekly paper, “Die Zeit,” as an investigative editor, where he created and edited the collaborative fact-checking site “Faktomat”. In his free time, he is a director at his theater company in his hometown of Vienna.