Reuters names Kim its Korea bureau chief

Jean Yoon, regional editor in Asia for Reuters, sent out the following announcement:

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce that Soyoung Kim has been appointed Bureau Chief, Korea, where she will oversee a multimedia news operation in Seoul that covers everything from the communist regime in North Korea to technology powerhouse Samsung.

Soyoung is currently the Regulation Editor based in Washington DC, responsible for the coverage of the intersection between Corporate America and Washington. That includes federal regulators, antitrust, lobbying, and other policy areas that impact the private sector.

Soyoung began her career at Reuters in Seoul in 2005 and moved to Detroit in 2008 in the middle of the great auto industry restructuring, reporting on the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler and their exit from U.S. government ownership.

She moved to New York in 2010 to cover M&A and broke news of mega deals including Verizon Communications’ $100 billion bid to take full control of Verizon Wireless and the merger of US Airways and American Airlines. She became EIC in 2013 and led the team that won the Reuters Journalist of the Year Award in 2014 in the reporting team of the year category.

Before coming to Reuters, Soyoung was a politics reporter at a Korean newspaper and one of her first assignments was to cover the impeachment of the South Korean president at the time and the subsequent rejection of the parliamentary motion by the Constitutional Court. She will be returning to a familiar scene.

As someone who grew up in Korea but has spent a decade away from the country, she hopes to bring cultural understanding of the region as well as global perspective to the story.

She will take on her new posting in the spring and report to me. Please join me in congratulating Soyoung on her new appointment.

Best, Jean