Western, formerly with WSJ, joins NY Times in Soeul

New York Times international editor Phil Pan sent out the following on Wednesday:

We’re excited to announce that Neil Western has joined The Times’s Asia news hub in Seoul as an editor guiding coverage of Japan and the Koreas.

Neil is an accomplished editor and an experienced Asia hand whose work spans some of the biggest stories and prizes of the past two decades. The correspondents he has worked with have held him up as an indispensable partner.

For the past nine years, Neil was The Wall Street Journal’s business editor in Asia, running corporate coverage that included the China-U.S. tech race, the chip war and the rise of Chinese electric vehicles. He oversaw a project that revealed the extent of China’s surveillance state and won the 2018 Gerald Loeb award for international reporting. His reporting team exposed risky gene-editing experiments in China, revealed that China had identified a new coronavirus that led to the Covid-19 pandemic, and documented the rise and stumbles of Huawei.

Neil simultaneously ran The Journal’s Hong Kong news file for seven years, through the hectic days of the pro-democracy protests in 2019 and the subsequent national security crackdown. Before that, he ran the projects and investigative reporting team in Asia at Bloomberg News. He was a primary editor on the widely praised investigation into how China’s politically connected elite accumulated wealth, a project that won several awards including the George Polk award for foreign reporting.

Neil started out as a crime reporter in Birmingham in his native England and worked for newspapers in Hong Kong before joining Agence France-Presse in 2004. He earned a postgraduate degree in journalism at the University of Wales after graduating in politics and international relations. He is married with two children, one of them still at school.

Please join us in welcoming him.