Gina Chua

Gina Chua is Executive Editor at Semafor, a new global news startup.  She joined it in May 2022 as part of the founding team led by Ben Smith and Justin Smith.

Prior to joining Semafor, she was Executive Editor at Reuters, where she oversaw newsroom operations, logistics, budgets, safety and security, and worked with technology teams to develop newsroom tools, among other responsibilities. In earlier roles at Reuters, Gina managed the graphics department, helped build a world-class data and computational journalism team, oversaw the creation of the ground-breaking Connected China app, which tracked and visualized power and relationships among China’s elite, and drove development of Tracer, a machine-learning system that algorithmically detected and verified newsworthy events on Twitter

Gina was also the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong; a deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York; a foreign correspondent in Singapore, Manila and Hanoi; and a television and radio journalist in Singapore. She co-founded the Sigma Data Journalism Awards and was the inaugural recipient of the Online News Association’s Impact Award for her dedication to innovation.  She’s a regular speaker at journalism conferences and writes occasionally about the future of journalism and the intersection of the industry and technology on her blog. She sits on the boards of non-profit news organizations and funders. 

A native of Singapore, she graduated with a bachelor’s in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.  Gina transitioned in late 2020, making her one of the most senior transgender journalists in the industry.