Moderator: Ying Chan, Journalism and Media Studies Center at The University of Hong Kong.
Panelist:
Hannah Beech, TIME Asia
Bopha Phorn, The Cambodia Daily
Kate O’Keeffe, The Wall Street Journal
Didi Kirsten Tatlow, The International New York Times
Moderator – Ying Chan
An award-winning journalist, Chan is currently professor of journalism and director of the Journalism and Media Studies Center at The University of Hong Kong. As founding director of the JMSC, she has created graduate, undergraduate and professional programs in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Prior to joining HKU in 1998, Chan spent 23 years working as a journalist in New York City. Her honors include a Nieman Fellowship, a Polk Award for her reporting on the human-smuggling trade from China, and an International Press Freedom Award for her battle against a criminal libel suit in Taiwan.
She consults often for HK and international media organizations and serves on the board of directors of the Media Development Loan Fund, USA, and the steering committee of the Global Fund for Media Development. She was also a board member of the Peabody Awards for electronic media from 2004 to 2009. Her research interests include media development in China, journalism education, and practices of professional journalism.
Panelist – Hannah Beech
Hannah Beech is TIME’s East Asia Correspondent and China Bureau Chief. She covers politics, conflicts, culture, diplomacy and other regional issues from a base in Beijing. Beech joined TIME, the world’s largest English-language newsweekly, in 1997 as a reporter in Hong Kong. In 2000 she moved to Beijing as a correspondent and later relocated to Shanghai to serve as Shanghai Bureau Chief. She became the Bangkok-based Southeast Asia Bureau Chief in 2006 and returned to China in 2010. One of the few international journalists to report widely from Burma, she also has spent more than a decade documenting the tremendous rise of China and other Asian economies.
During her tenure at TIME, Beech has reported across Asia, from Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea to East Timor and Tajikistan. She has won numerous reporting honors, including the Amnesty Human Rights Press Award, the Henry Luce Award and several Society of Publishers in Asia prizes. In 2011, she was named the Journalist of the Year by the Society of Publishers in Asia. Beech, who is half-Japanese and half-American, speaks Japanese, Mandarin and French.
Panelist – Kate O’Keeffe
Kate O’Keeffe is the Wall Street Journal’s global gambling reporter. Based in Hong Kong for the past four years, she has contributed to major Wall Street Journal scoops on the dispute between Steve Wynn and his former partner Kazuo Okada, and on the U.S. government’s money laundering and bribery investigations into Las Vegas Sands Corp.
She has also taken on special assignments such as disaster reporting in the Philippines and a series on Cambodia’s garment industry.
She joined the company as an editor in Singapore in 2008 after graduating from Princeton University in 2005. She is a native of Buffalo, NY.
Panelist – Bopha Phorn
Bopha Phorn is Editor-at-Large for The Cambodia Daily, Cambodia’s leading newspaper. She has been working as a journalist for about eight years. As an investigative journalist, Bopha covers economics, politics, corruption and environmental issues. Bopha tracks the activities of the prime minister, other cabinet ministers, opposition leaders and National Assembly members. She began her career with Deutsche Presse Agenteur in 2006 when she was 21 years old. She started working for The Cambodia Daily newspaper in 2008. After two years of reporting, she was assigned as Assignment Editor.
Bopha received the Courage In Journalism Award from the International Media Foundation (IWMF) for her report on rampant illegal logging when she was shot at by military police while investigating the story. Bopha also attended the Political and Electoral Reporting course of the International Institute for Journalism in Germany in 2012 after she attended the Writing and Reporting News course supported by Thomson Reuters in London in 2010. She also has contributed a chapter to a book called Phnom Penh Noir.
Panelist – Didi Kirsten Tatlow
Didi Kirsten Tatlow is a correspondent for the International New York Times in Beijing.
Didi has won a dozen journalism prizes, including SOPA awards and human rights awards. Born in Hong Kong, she has worked and lived in Asia and Europe for nearly two decades and speaks several languages including Chinese and German. She previously worked at The Associated Press, Die Welt, and the South China Morning Post, among others.
She lives in Beijing with her husband, children and two Boxer dogs. She’s chiefly interested in the sociocultural politics of the (to her) Big Three: gender, the state, and the arts.