Warangkana Chomchuen
The 2011 recipient of the Wall Street Journal Asia Fellowship at NYU is Warangkana Chomchuen, a production coordinator in the Bangkok bureau of NBC News since 2007. Warangkana has field produced major news stories and a variety of features throughout Asia for NBC’s Nightly News, the Today Show, and MSNBC.
Warangkana will enroll this September in NYU’s Master of Arts program in Business and Economic Reporting, where she will take courses in business writing at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute as well as finance and economics courses in the MBA program at NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The Dow Jones Foundation funds the fellowship to help improve the quality of reporting on Asian economies. Past recipients of the Fellowship have gone on to jobs covering business and economics at The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Reuters, the Financial Times, and the Financial Times’ Debtwire.
Warangkana said that the fellowship “will equip me with the knowledge and skills I need to thoroughly understand, and report on, business and finance. I would like to learn to make business news more appealing and relevant to a broad audience.” She adds that the critical importance of Asia in the world economy demands intellectual depth on the part of journalists covering it. “Asia has seen dramatic economic growth and changes. Covering Asian economies at this pivotal time will require more than knowledge of business. It is important to recognize historical ties, differences and similarities between countries in the region, as well as undermining factors such as political instability and economic inequality.”
In her current job, Warangkana creates multimedia packages of text, video and photography for msnbc.com, covering news on Thai politics, the environment, and human rights. Among other high-profile assignments, she was involved in the live broadcast of the Today Show’s ‘Where in the World is Matt Lauer’ in Laos in 2008, CNBC’s coverage of the G20 summit 2010 in Seoul, and the Today Show’s interview with Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon, Myanmar in 2011.
Previously, Warangkana worked as a Bangkok-based researcher/reporter for NHK, Japan’s Broadcasting Corporation. She has also been a contributor to Elle Décoration magazine, Thai edition, and as a freelance book translator.
Warangkana graduated with honors in English from the Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Three years later, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University from 2006-2007, where she majored in broadcast.
Warangkana, or “Waan” as family and friends call her, was born and raised in the rural province of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand. She spent most summers of her childhood exploring nature with her brother at army ranger camps where her father was stationed. Her mother, a primary school teacher, fostered in her a love of reading and learning. Warangkana is also a cinephile. As a teenager, she earned money to buy books and movies by working as a beekeeper, bookshop assistant, and typist.
Warangkana aspires to be a cross-platform business journalist. She wants to take advantage of technology and multimedia to make business news appealing to a diverse group of readers. "There could not be a more exciting time to embark on a career as a business journalist,” she says. “The WSJ Fellowship will give me the experience that many aspiring business reporters can only dream of. It offers me the ideal training ground in New York City, the financial capital of the world, and a chance to learn to report on complex economic issues with confidence. I am thrilled and honored to be accepting the fellowship. I look forward to the challenges and opportunities it brings.”
