WSJ reporter Mahtani joins Washington Post

Wall Street Journal reporter Shibani Mahtani has been hired by The Washington Post to help it open a bureau in Hong Kong.

She will move to Asia in mid-June.

For the past 18 months, Mahtani has covered the U.S. criminal justice system and the Midwest more broadly at The Journal’s Chicago bureau.

She covered Southeast Asia for The Journal from 2011 to 2016, first from a base in Singapore and then from Burma for three years surrounding the landmark 2015 elections that ended nearly 50 years of military rule. She has also reported from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

Mahtani grew up in Singapore and graduated from the London School of Economics and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She speaks Malay.

The opening of the bureau in Hong Kong is a part of an expansion in foreign coverage by The Post, which in 2018 has also created a new bureau in Rome and added a second correspondent to its team in Mexico City.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.