IRENE JAY LIU is a Singapore-based reporter and editor, with extensive experience in print, digital, radio, investigative and data journalism.
Liu leads the Google News Lab in the Asia-Pacific region, where she develops partnerships and programs to promote newsroom innovation, counter mis/disinformation and support greater diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the news industry.
She was most recently a reporter on the global enterprise team at Thomson Reuters, where she was a 2017 Pulitzer finalist in the national reporting category. She led the development of Reuters' Connected China, an award-winning news app that tracks and visualizes the people and institutions that make up China's power structure, for which she was a 2013 finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and received a Reuters Journalist of the Year Award for "Storytelling Innovation of the Year."
She also teaches courses on data-driven investigative reporting at the University of Hong Kong and digital journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Previously, she was senior reporter and special projects team leader at the South China Morning Post based in Hong Kong, where she reported on transnational crime and law enforcement and led the paper's computer-assisted and document-based reporting projects. She was awarded first place in the "Best News Writing - English" category at the 2010 Hong Kong News Awards.
Until January 2010, she was a political writer for the Capitol Bureau of the Albany Times Union, where she wrote for print, was lead blogger for the paper's most-read blog, Capitol Confidential, and was an on-air correspondent for the statewide PBS television program New York Now.
She is a contributor to National Public Radio and has been heard on Morning Edition, Weekend All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, as well as affiliate stations WNYC and KQED.
Liu has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a fellow with the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.
Before becoming a journalist, she worked for years in the non-profit and philanthropic sector. While an undergrad at Yale, she cofounded and led Advanced Strategies for Healthcare Access, for which she was nominated for the Ford Foundation's Leadership in a Changing World award and profiled in The New York Times. She then worked as a consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Irene grew up in the Show Me state, born and raised in St. Louis until her family moved to Shanghai, China in 1995. She bounced up and down both US coasts for over a decade before settling in Asia in 2010.
Irene has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Yale University and a Master of Science in Journalism from Columbia University.