Board Members 2023-2024
AAJA-Asia board members are selected through a chapter-wide nomination and voting process. Board members serve a two-year term.
K. Oanh Ha, President
K. Oanh Ha oversees Asia coverage of consumer and healthcare news for Bloomberg. She joined the news organization in 2010 as Vietnam bureau chief. Before joining Bloomberg, she worked as a host and reporter for KQED Public Radio in San Francisco on its nationally-syndicated program, Pacific Time, examining the connections between Asia, the U.S. and Asian American issues. She’s also reported for the San Jose Mercury News, covering Asia Pacific affairs, technology and small businesses. She was born in Vietnam and grew up in California.
K. Oanh Ha also serves as our National Advisory Board Representative.
Zela Chin, Executive Vice President
An award-winning journalist, Zela is the principal reporter for the weekly, prime-time documentary program Pearl Magazine on TVB, the largest broadcaster in Hong Kong. Prior to launching Pearl Magazine, she was a reporter with TVB’s business feature program, Money Magazine. TVB shows reach 2.3 million households in the city, and over 300 million households worldwide.
Zela started her career at CNN headquarters in the U.S. and later joined CNN in Hong Kong to produce Talk Asia. Highlights include interviews with Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, scientist Stephen Hawking and opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.
Gilles Demptos, Director for Asia Pacific
Gilles is the Director for Asia Pacific of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA). Prior to joining this organization, Gilles has worked at advancing press freedom and the sustainability of quality, independent journalism for over 15 years at WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News publishers, in particular as Director of Asia between 2014 and 2018. More recently, Gilles was heading Public Policy and Government Affairs APAC for the news and media industries at Google. Gilles has also been the editor of the Asian Newsmedia Focus magazine for almost a decade, between 2009 and 2018.
Jeanhee Kim, Treasurer
Jeanhee Kim is a veteran news and business journalist and editor. A contributing editor for Forbes Asia based in Singapore, she is a native New Yorker who worked at Crain’s New York Business–where she produced the 40 Under 40, Fast 50, and Most Powerful Women lists–and Money magazine. At Oxygen Media, she launched the late-but-great ka-Ching.com, a personal finance and career site for women.
Bernice Sibucao, Secretary
Bernice Sibucao is one of the youngest newsroom managers of GMA Network, the Philippines’ largest news organization. She heads the network’s first and only Digital Video and Audio Lab. Her pioneering team has positioned GMA’s News and Public Affairs Division as a major player in digital with innovative programs and production strategies that drove billions of viewership and helped reach new audiences in emerging platforms.
Prior to this role, Bernice served as the Assistant Manager of GMA News and Public Affairs’ Social Media Team where she helped establish a formidable and wide-reaching online presence for GMA Public Affairs’ social platforms.
Bernice graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University with a degree in Communications and with magna cum laude honors. She was a fellow of the first joint US-Asia cohort of AAJA’s 25th Executive Leadership Program, a recipient of the Dinah Eng Leadership Fellowship 2022, and the sole Filipino fellow chosen for The Poynter Institute’s September 2022 Leadership Academy for Women in Media.
Holly Chik, co-Vice President, Hong Kong
Holly Chik is a reporter covering China for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. She served on the AAJA-Asia board as the student representative in 2019.
Juliana Liu, co-Vice President, Hong Kong
Juliana Liu is the Asia editor at CNN Business. Previously, she had worked at Forkast News, Inkstone, BBC News and Reuters. Juliana first joined AAJA when she was an undergraduate in California, helping to organize pizza nights for fellow students to learn from and mix with established journalists. She remains fiercely dedicated to the mission of AAJA: to advocate for our members and increase diversity and inclusion in newsrooms.
Grace Moon, co-Vice President, Seoul
Grace Moon is the global audience editor at The Washington Post’s Seoul hub. She has previously served on the boards of AAJA New York & Seoul and is also currently the co-director of AAJA’s affinity group for early-career and student journalists, yung AAJA. Before joining The Post, Grace was a freelance journalist in Seoul for two years. She can be reached at gracesoyeonmoon@gmail.com.
Hieun Shin, co-Vice President, Seoul
Hieun Shin is a reporter currently covering South and North Korea at The Economist. She served as a board member at the AAJA Seoul Chapter from 2021 to 2022. Hieun graduated from Ewha Womans University with degrees in International Economics and Law and Business administration. Aside from her passion for reporting about esports, she is an avid player, and especially enjoys playing League of Legends, Overwatch and Hearthstone in her free time. Despite the spelling, her name is pronounced ‘He-eun’. You can find her on Twitter at @hieunshin.
Mike Raomanachai, co-Vice President, Singapore and Southeast Asia
Mike Raomanachai is a Thailand Teaching Fellow for Google News Lab. In this role, he shares his expertise in digital tools, verification, online security, and data journalism to his fellow journalists in Thailand and the region. Before joining Google, Mike was a business and technology reporter for Voice TV, a tv network in Thailand, and a freelance producer for Thai PBS.
Mike joined AAJA in 2011 as a student member in San Francisco, California. Then he moved back to Thailand in November 2012 to pursue his journalism career. He took the first leadership role as an AAJA-Asia’s co-vice president of Southeast Asia and Singapore between 2015-2017.
Tom Benner, co-Vice President, Singapore and Southeast Asia
Tom Benner is a Singapore-based journalist. He writes news stories for Al Jazeera English, columns for Mainichi Shimbun’s bilingual news magazine Mainichi Weekly, and works as a copy editor and fact-checker at Forbes Asia. He has served as editor of N3Magazine, the official publication of N3Conference. He became an elected board member of the Singapore Press Club in 2013 and joined the AAJA-Asia board in 2019. Before relocating to Singapore from Boston, Mass., in 2012, Tom worked in the US as a statehouse bureau chief, editorial writer, and editor of a street paper.
Erica Yokoyama, co-Vice President, Tokyo
Erica Yokoyama is an economic reporter at Bloomberg News Tokyo, covering a wide range of Japan-related financial, economic and political news in English and Japanese. She has lived most of her life in Japan, except for 3 years of study in Europe. Erica joined Bloomberg in 2020, after experiencing student internships at several media institutions including TV Asahi Washington D.C. Bureau, Japan Times and NYT. Other than her current role, Erica has been interested in writing stories about ESG, especially on climate change and sustainability.
Kantaro Komiya, co-Vice President, Tokyo
Kantaro is a reporter at Reuters’ Tokyo bureau, where he covers economic policies and a wide variety of breaking news and human-interest stories in Japan. Before joining Reuters, Kantaro had worked for six English-language newsrooms as an intern, including at the Associated Press during the postponed Tokyo Olympics and Bloomberg where he wrote a feature about a translation gadget boom in Japan, which won the 2020 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar Award. His other reporting stints include Malaysiakini, Barron’s and Rest of World. Kantaro grew up in Japan until high school and earned a B.A. in Economics from DePauw University in the U.S.
Yehoon Ahn, Student Representative
Yehoon Ahn is a second-year data science major at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He joined AAJA as a summer intern in 2022, helping with the production of N3Magazine and the planning of N3Con. With a background in data science, Yehoon wants to get into journalism with a specialty in data analysis. He is originally from South Korea, but he went to high school in the U.S. In his free time, he likes to read and play sports.
Kari Soo Lindberg, At-Large board member
Kari Soo Lindberg is a former nutritionist turned journalist. She previously reported on indigenous textile rights in Guatemala and the American prison system as a freelance journalist. She now works at Bloomberg in Hong Kong. She plans to move to South American within the next decade to cover the Chinese investments in the region. She loves meeting new people and can be reached at @Karisoo1 on Twitter.
Regina Hing, At-Large Board member
Regina Hing (Regina Lay) was the Head of News for and an anchor at Bloomberg TV Philippines, running a team of more than 2 dozen and overseeing the daily editorial agenda for the network. In the 3 years that the channel was on air, BTVPH successfully overtook its main competitor in business news, in terms of online viewership and engagement. When the channel folded in 2018, she took on freelance hosting and consulting gigs for a little while–including training newsrooms under the Google News Initiative program–and eventually co-founding an electric bike startup that aims to change the way people commute. Before joining Bloomberg TV Philippines, Regina was a Senior Producer/Evening Editor on the Business Desk at Channel NewsAsia in Singapore, helping produce the channel’s coverage of business and financial markets globally. She holds a Masters in Business and Economic Reporting from New York University.
Jenny Hsu, National Advisory Board Representative
Jenny W. Hsu is the founder and CEO of Cetacea Inc., a Taipei-based media consulting firm that helps start-ups everywhere break waves and make a splash.
Prior to that, Jenny was a journalist for over a decade working for top outlets such as The Wall Street Journal from Taiwan and Hong Kong, Taipei Times and the Central News Agency in Taiwan. Jenny was the vice-president for AAJA Hong Kong from 2015 to 2017.
AAJA-Asia would also like to express its heartfelt gratitude to all its former board members who greatly contributed to shape this Chapter into the unique organization it is today. Their names can be found here.