AAJA-LA Board

Jocelyn “Joz” Wang, President – National Advisory Board Representative, is an avid writer who embraced blogging at its onset.  Known online– and offline– for her personal blog jozjozjoz.com, she is a Co-Editor of the popular Asian American collaborative blog 8Asians.com.  She is also a long-time contributor blogging.la, flagship site of the Metblogs network, a massive local journalism and media project that began in 2003.  In late 2011, she acquired the entire Metroblogging.com network from its founders and now runs the entire international network—consisting of over 50 sites worldwide— as its Publisher and CEO.Professionally, she is currently part of the Creative Team at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online, working to deliver a world-class online experience to Disney Guests.  Prior to this, she was a Senior Strategy Consultant at speakTECH (now Perficient), an interactive design and technology firm, designing business solutions for clients such as Disney/ABC Television Networks, NBC-Universal, DTS Digital Entertainment, PepsiCo, The Estée Lauder Companies, City of Hope, and the Municipality of Anchorage.  She contributes her web expertise in Information Architecture, User Experience (UX), and Social Media to UsabilityCounts.com. 

A Southern California native, Joz’s prior professional experience includes Marketing Project Manager at The Nielsen Company, Marketing Manager at Nelson Davis Television Productions (KTLA-TV), and Manager of National Accounts at CBS/Westwood One Radio Networks.

Joz received her MBA from Pepperdine University and her BA from UCLA.

Aside from serving as AAJA-LA’s 2012 President, Joz also serves on the AAJA National Advisory Board and National Governing Board for the 2012-2013 term.

DAVID ONO, Vice President – Broadcast, David Ono mans the anchor desk twice a day on ABC7. Ono first joined the “Eyewitness News” team in 1996. Through the years, you’ve also seen David host the popular magazine show “Eye on LA.” He also co-anchored “Eyewitness News This Morning.” Ono has won eight Emmy awards and 19 nominations. His career has included stops in Sacramento at KOVR-TV, El Paso at KDBC-TV, Midland/Odessa at KOSA-TV and Dallas at KXAS-TV. Ono grew up in Texas and is a graduate of the University of North Texas. He has served the Los Angeles chapter as a longtime Vice President and board member, and as the Emcee of the annual “Trivia Bowl.”
 

RICHARD CHANG, Vice-president Print Richard Chang is an arts and entertainment writer for The Orange County Register, where he has worked since February 2000. He specializes in visual art and museums, but has also written about television, movies, film festivals, the performing arts and Southern California media. He also does art news and reviews for the national magazine ARTnews.
Richard has worked at a few different newspapers, including The Santa Fe New Mexican, The Bakersfield Californian and The Albuquerque Journal. He has freelanced for a number of other publications, including the San Francisco Bay Guardian, A. Magazine, Tribal College Journal and Asian Week.

Richard teaches an arts and entertainment journalism and writing workshop at UCLA. The course is designed for students who wish to write about A&E for The Daily Bruin. He has taught courses in journalism and writing at California State University, Fullerton and Los Angeles Valley College.
His experience in radio includes stints at KQED in San Francisco, KALX in Berkeley, KUCI in Irvine and radioinvasion.com. Richard graduated from Brown University with honors in English and American Literature and received a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Richard hopes to expand AAJA-LA’s reach to journalism professionals and students in Orange County.
SHRADDHA SWAROOP, Vice President of Online Media, is an award-winning freelance graphic designer in print design, illustration and web design projects. Her online expertise includes information architecture, user experience and social media. Along with web and mobile design, her projects have included social media coaching for individual local clients and managing a Twitter and Facebook profiles for an international client with an worldwide audience.Being in the  print news industry for more than 12 years ago,  she has worked for Variety,  the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News and The Virginian-Pilot among others . She is currently working to create a print newspaper for an online-only news gathering organization called The Gateway Reporter. 

She is on the boards of two journalism organizations, works as an art director mentoring broadcast, print and multimedia journalism students in the AAJA Voices program and has lectured extensively on design, collaboration and editing throughout the nation. For more on her experience, projects and awards see web.mac.com/shraddhaswaroop/portfolio/home.html
SHAWN WONG, Treasurer Shawn Nicole Wong is an urban planning consultant based in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. She has previously written for Venice Magazine and interned for ABC News 20/20 and Primetime.
Board of Directors
KIM BUI is the social media and community editor for Southern California Public Radio (89.3 KPCC). She has worked for online and traditional news operations as an editor, reporter and web producer including The Loop 21, San Luis Obispo Tribune and the Kansas City Star. She is also a co-creator of the weekly Twitter web journalism chat, #wjchat.
aajala_buckleyFRANK BUCKLEY Frank Buckley is co-anchor of the KTLA Morning Show. Previously, he was a National Correspondent with CNN based in Los Angeles. He has also worked as a reporter at KCAL-TV, KESQ-TV in Palm Springs and as a weekend anchor at WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, NC. Buckley is the recipient of numerous awards including the Emmy and the Golden Mike. Buckley is a graduate of USC. His internships while at USC included CBS Network News, news writing at KNX and reporting for the Detroit News and the Los Angeles Times. Buckley, whose mother is Japanese, was a recipient of an AAJA scholarship.
Denise L. Poon is a Broadcast Producer, Multimedia Consultant and Principal of Creative Streamline, a CUCP-certified DBE/MBE/WBE and SLB for the City of Los Angeles.  

Her career spans more than 15 years of broad-based communication with content creation for broadcast networks ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, PBS and private clients  in various formats- breaking news, feature and long format, including DATELINE NBC, and America’s Most Wanted. With AAJA, she is best known for many years of leadership for Trivia Bowl, the Chapter’s signature “fun-raising” event.
Liberty Zabala (@LibertyZabala) is an anchor and multimedia journalist at Valley View News, which broadcasts on Ch. 36 LA Sundays at 3:30pm. She worked as a general assignment reporter at Channel 3 News, a cable access station in Garden Grove, CA.  She is a senior at California State University, Northridge majoring in journalism with a collateral in political science. 

Born and raised in Eagle Rock, CA to LAHerald Examiner reporter Laurencio V. Zabala Jr., she grew up hanging out with her dad in the newsroom. In high school, she began writing for her campus paper quickly becoming managing editor. She has held several broadcast internships including Fox News Channel, Fox Sports Net, KABC and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. She has written for multiple publications including the L.A. Youth, Saturday Night Magazine and University Link Magazine. She has conducted high profile interviews from actress Alexa Vega to world champion boxer Manny Pacquiao to 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. She serves as the president of the CSUN chapter of Radio Television Digital News Association. She also serves as a board director of the LA Chapter of Asian American Journalists Association.

 

She covered the 2011 AAJA Detroit National Convention as a Voices reporter/anchor. Liberty was recently selected as a Meredith Cronkite fellow at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism reporting for KPHO (CBS 5) in Phoenix, Arizona. Her goal is to become an international correspondent.
KY TRANG HO– Business Investors Daily —  Trang Ho covers exchange traded and mutual funds for Investor’s Business Daily, where she’s worked since 2005. 

Before the newspaper, she worked at a public radio station in Southern California as a reporter and producer. She has also worked as a newscast producer in Palm Springs. She has a BA in Sociology from UC Berkeley and an MA in Communications and Journalism from The Ohio State University, where she was a fellow in the Kiplinger Public Affairs Journalism Program.
HENRY FUHRMANN is assistant managing editor for the copy desks, the library and standards at the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the Times in 1990, Henry has served as an editor in the metro, foreign, features and business departments. He was the first chief of the morning copy desk, which he helped establish in 2007 to serve latimes.com. He started his current assignment in March 2009. 

Henry previously worked at Newsday, where he was a member of the first class of copy editors in Times Mirror’s Minority Editorial Training Program. Before entering the news business, he studied engineering at Caltech and UCLA and worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Henry holds two degrees in journalism: a bachelor’s from Cal State L.A. and a master’s from Columbia. He was born in Japan and grew up in Ventura County, about an hour’s drive up the coast from Los Angeles. He is a longtime leader of AAJA-LA, having served as chapter president, treasurer, secretary, board member and advisor.
ANH DO will go wherever the story takes her. A second-generation journalist, she is vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language publication in the US, founded by her late father. There, she launched Nguoi Viet 2, an English section for younger readers, along with focusing on strategic planning, community relations, ad partnerships and editorial programs bridging her community with Asian or mainstream communities. 

Do is a graduate of USC with degrees in journalism and English literature. She started her career at the Dallas Morning News and the Seattle Times before writing for the Orange County Register for 12 years, including a column on Asian affairs. Her reporting has taken her to England, Guatemala, Peru, Vietnam, India, Cuba, and 18 states in Mexico. Her work has been honored by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, AAJA, the DART award for excellence in reporting on victims of violence and Freedom Newspapers’ Sweepstakes Award. Recently, Do also served as managing editor of Spot.Us, a community-powered reporting project in partnership with USC Annenberg. Through the site, the public can commission stories around Los Angeles, with content distributed to multimedia groups.
SUZANNE JOE KAI was among the first Asian American female news broadcasters to “break the glass ceiling” in San Francisco. She was a TV news reporter, documentary producer, and public affairs show host for KRON-TV (when it was NBC-SF), and also worked as a journalist on-camera for KTVU-TV Oakland, and KGO-TV (ABC-SF).She is currently producing two documentaries. Suzanne is the founder of StudioLA.TV, a production company which produces news & entertainment programming for wireless, online and television outlets. Suzanne is a member & 2007- 2010 judge with the Emmys Interactive Peer Group in Hollywood. She is the publisher and co-founder of AsianConnections. com. Suzanne earned a Masters degree in Communication from Stanford University.
MATT STEVENS is a print journalist who will begin the Metpro training program at the Los Angeles Times in the fall of 2011. Matt interned for The Times and the Orange County Register as a sports reporter after eight years in scholastic journalism. While in Sports, Matt has covered everything from professional soccer, to college basketball, to high school baseball. 

In the summer of 2010, with the aid of the Bridget O’Brien Scholarship, he and a partner reported on the exploitive machinery behind international basketball recruiting during a 31-day trip to Yaoundé, Cameroon. The team’s work won several awards, including the Society of Professional Journalists national Mark of Excellence for investigative reporting.

 

 
GRACE LIM is an Associate Producer at CBS2/KCAL9 NewsCentral. She has been involved in AAJA since college. In 2003, she joined the LA Chapter, where she served as Secretary. She also served as a student coordinator, putting together informational panels and discussions for students interested in journalism. She is also currently the social chair, organizing networking events for journalists in the LA area.

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