Journalism and writing

For three years at Bloomberg News I covered China's credit and property markets — local government debt, the retreat of shadow banking, and the collapse of Evergrande. The daily material was a flood of filings, data and rumours, and the job was to work out which of it actually mattered.

I also appeared on Bloomberg Television and markets podcasts, where a complicated question has to become intelligible in a few minutes. It settled something for me: whether you can explain a thing clearly depends on whether you have actually thought it through.

Author page at this newsroom

For most of my two and a half years in the Journal's Shanghai bureau I was on the road: into rural China with foreign correspondents to cover African swine fever, sitting in farmhouses while people described losing a herd overnight; interviewing the truck drivers and delivery riders who made a living through an app.

The pressure in the writing came from a different direction. Every figure and quotation is interrogated by editors and fact-checkers: How do you know? Who told you? What evidence points the other way? It left me with a habit — establish the facts first, then think about how to say it.

My first full-time job out of university, covering fundraising and listing plans at technology start-ups. The difficulty was plain: get someone to tell you something that is not yet public. Over that year I interviewed more than thirty chief executives and broke news at companies including Pear Video, Byton, Unisound and Binance.

This is where I learned to ask questions — including how to come at one from a different angle when someone deflects. Advising applicants, I find the most valuable material surfaces after the third or fourth follow-up. It is the same method.