Longtime WSJ journalist in Asia to receive Missouri Honor Medal

A longtime Wall Street Journal journalist in Asia is receiving the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.

S.K. Witcher began her career in Hong Kong as an intern from the Missouri School of Journalism at the then newly founded Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal.

She went on to spend more than three decades with The Journal as a foreign correspondent and senior editor working in Asia, the U.S., Latin America and Australia covering a diverse range of topics, including international banking and the Latin American debt crisis, for which she was nominated as part of a team for the Pulitzer Prize.

Witcher was assistant managing editor of The Journal in Hong Kong from 2002 to 2005. From 2006 to 2010, she was editor of the WSJ’s Weekend Journal Asia, a weekly culture and lifestyle magazine, winning several awards, including from the Society of News Design.

Before joining The New York Times in 2013, Witcher was a writing coach and senior editor in charge of business coverage at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

She served as a tutor for graduate journalism students at Hong Kong Baptist University for four years. For the past two years she has been chair of the Editorial Committee of the Society of Publishers in Asia, which oversees annual awards for excellence in journalism that are regarded as the Pulitzers of Asia, and is a voice for press freedom and journalists’ rights in the Asia Pacific region.

She has a bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, and a master’s degree in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism.