Asian American Journalists Association
Anny Hong
After working as an Anchor/Reporter at CBS13 (Sacramento, CA), Anny Hong is fulfilling her dream of living in Paris. She moved to France to cover stories in Europe and attend the prestigious Sorbonne University to learn French. She also took cooking courses at the world-renowned Cordon Bleu Culinary Institution. Along with going to school, she has been blogging about her life and experiences in France for CBS13. She has also been Skyping and reporting LIVE from various events and interesting locations for Good Day Sacramento and CBS13.
Prior to Sacramento, Anny has also worked as an Anchor/Reporter for KGPE (Fresno, CA), KVAL (Eugene, OR) and WSTM (Syracuse, NY). She got her start at WWTI in Watertown, NY, as a one-man band reporter. She is also a graduate (cum laude) of Syracuse University, where she majored in Broadcast Journalism and Policy Studies.
It was during her time in Paris, Anny was inspired to start a non-profit start-up for journalists. She plans on giving journalists a platform for volunteerism by connecting them with non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) all across the world. Coming from a family of small business owners, she hopes to combine her love of telling stories and her spirit of entrepreneurship in her latest project. She is also embracing the latest in technology to encourage journalists to tell stories that aren’t being covered by mass media.
Toan Lam
Toan Lam is the creator and host of www.GoInspireGo.com (GIG), a website that uses social media and multimedia platforms to inspire social change. GIG produces character driven stories that highlight personal contributions to the community. The goal is to help viewers discover their power and use it to help others through civic engagement. Toan has nearly a decade of experience in the television industry as a reporter and producer for local news markets across the country and for the PBS show, California Heartland. He also teaches and and writes curriculum for the Academy of Art and the University of San Francisco.
Mariel Myers
Mariel Calizo Myers is an Emmy Award-winning producer with 14 years of television news and video-storytelling experience. As Managing Editor of Yahoo’s Digital Media Bureau, she produced original video content for social media, as well as internal and consumer broadcast. As part of Yahoo’s Global Communications Team, she helped develop corporate videos and strategies to promote products for various teams, including mobile and search. For 10 years, she was a news producer at CBS5/KPIX-TV. Mariel has been nominated for five Emmys, winning for Best Daytime Newscast in 2009. Her 2008 election night webcast won for Best Webcast by the Associated Press, Television and Radio Association. Mariel was selected as a fellow for the Knight Digital M edia Center’s Multimedia Journalism Workshop, where she learned how to produce multimedia stories with the latest hardware and software. She is also a graduate of the Asian American Journalists Association Executive Leadership Program. She recently formed a media production company in San Francisco and is currently a senior producer at ABC7/KGO-TV.
Raghuram Vadarevu
Raghuram Vadarevu is the deputy enterprise editor at The Associated Press’ West Regional Desk in Phoenix. The desk works with reporters and editors in a 13-state region, stretching from the Rocky Mountains to Hawaii, to produce spot and enterprise coverage for the nation and the world.
Raghu began his journalism career in 1997 in a two-year reporting program at The Providence (R.I.) Journal. He was then asked to join the reporting staff, an opportunity seldom given to program graduates at the time. Raghu later became one of the Journal’s first online reporters.
During his time at The Journal, Raghu was selected as a Pew International Journalism fellow, learning about international affairs in Washington, D.C., and traveling to India to report a story about the impact of globalization on the nation’s indigenous people.
Raghu has a master’s degree with honors in journalism from Columbia University. He worked as a reporter at The Record of Bergen County, N.J., and The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times before joining The AP in 2006. He has since edited stories at the wire service’s National and International desks.
He is interested in the art of storytelling and how news organizations can harness the power of technology to inform their coverage of pressing issues and to better tell the stories of communities.
New U AAJA Mentor Bios
Kaizar Campwala
Kaizar Campwala has been editor of the online startup NewsTrust since shortly before its public launch in late 2006. Kaizar manages editorial activities and community development on the site. He has also been responsible for running NewsTrust’s collaborative “News Hunts,” in partnership with organizations such as the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Huffington Post.
Kaizar is a fellow with the Poynter Institute’s Sensemaking project, and will begin MBA studies at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management this fall. Prior to joining NewsTrust, Kaizar worked on communications projects with the City of New York, including Mayor Bloomberg’s 311 initiative. He earned a A.B. from Brown University in political science, with a focus on American political development
Sumaya Kazi
Sumaya Kazi is the Founder and CEO of YoProCo.
YoProCo is a soon to be launched intelligent recommendation engine and professional social network that acts as your trusted friend who connects you to a powerful global network of people you don’t know but should know.
Previously, Sumaya served as a Senior Social Media Manager at Fortune 500 Sun Microsystems where she was responsible for the global strategy and implementation of new and social media across across multiple platforms. While at Sun Microsystems, Sumaya founded The CulturalConnect. Her team published over 800 interviews across 5 weekly publications of under-35 leaders across different ethnic diasporas that led a viral chain of meaningful connections and tools for mobilization of young adults across 100 countries.
For her passion and success around her endeavors, Sumaya has been recognized by BusinessWeek as one of America’s “Best Young Entrepreneurs,” CNN as a “Young Person Who Rocks,” Silicon Valley Business Journal as a “Woman of Influence,” ColorLines Magazine as an “Innovator to Watch” and most recently by UTNE Reader Magazine as one of “50 Visionaries Changing Your World.”
Sumaya graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and resides in San Francisco. You can learn more about her at http://www.SumayaKazi.com.
Chrys Wu
Chrys Wu, a journalist and user engagement strategist, began her career as a motorcycle-riding, magazine-editing Web pioneer. She now works with businesses interested in deepening their connection to their audiences, communities and goals through research, social media and user-centric design.
Her clients include NYTimes.com, NPR, The Los Angeles Times and LATimes.com, Chronicle Books, Herman Miller, KCRW.com and WNYC.org. She is honored to be a judge for the 2009-2010 Knight News Challenge, which awards up to $5 million to fund tools, platforms and services to further forward-thinking projects for community news and social media.
In addition to news and technology, Chrys’s passions include architectural photography, cultural philanthropy, food, fencing (the sport, not the crime) and fashion.
She’s active on Twitter @MacDivaONA and can be reached at chryswu.com.
Bernice Yeung
Hyphen co-founder Bernice Yeung is a freelance journalist who writes about people, public policy, culture and the law. A former staff writer of SF Weekly and an editor at California Lawyer magazine, Bernice’s work has appeared in a variety of media outlets, including the The New York Times, Dwell, Glamour, Mother Jones and San Francisco magazine. Bernice was a regular contributor to KQED-FM’s “Pacific Time,” the only nationally syndicated radio program to cover Asian American affairs, and she authored the entry on “Asian American Journalists and the Press” for the Encyclopedia of American Journalism (Routledge, 2007). Bernice is also an advisory board member of the media startup Shareable.net, and serves on the board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter.
