Lu-Hai Liang

thoughts from a freelance foreign correspondent

From freelance to foreign correspondent – one person’s success story

with 4 comments

“I sold or gave away most of my stuff and headed east, pretty much on a whim”.

Those are the words of Kate Hodal, The Guardian’s south-east Asia correspondent. The story of how she got there is an inspiring antidote to these gloomy times. She also has some fantastic advice about multimedia journalism, especially video, for which she says there is tremendous demand. I had the fortune to interview Kate, via email, while I was based in China.

Here is the interview: http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/journalist-q-a-from-freelancer-to-se-asia-correspondent/s2/a553906/

4 Responses

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  1. […] this blog you can find posts with interviews and profiles of journalists who’ve ‘made it’. Their paths to success can be […]

  2. […] Kate Hodal (Guardian) sold most of her possessions to finance a move to south-east Asia and was so hard-up on so many occasions that she almost went home. But she persevered and now has the envy-inducing job of being South-east Asia correspondent, meaning she gets paid to fly to places like Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines from her base in Thailand. Jonathan Kaiman (also Guardian) had to survive on a low-paid internship and a visa that meant he had to take a stinking bus and van full of Mongolian tradesman to Mongolia every month for almost a year, but he got bylines in the New York Times, LA Times, Foreign Policy and is now one of the most talented China correspondents around. Alec Ash, a Brit and a Beijing resident, correspondent for The Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote for four years for free on his blog about China from his home in Beijing. Now he’s living it up on an advance for a book he’s been signed to write. […]

  3. […] worker in Burma. What it’s like to travel southeast Asia first as a freelancer, then as a correspondent. The methods and tactics of how to catapult yourself into becoming a media brand and a TV chef in […]

  4. […] zero so many times I nearly packed it in and went back home (on multiple occasions).    — Kate Hodal, freelancer turned Southeast Asia […]


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