Semafor Executive Editor Gina Chua reflects on the power of representation and visibility

No one in the media world knew what to expect when media veterans Ben Smith and Justin Smith raised $25 million and launched the global news site Semafor back in October 2022. Yet more than 18 months on from its launch, and after several significant resets, the buzzy outfit appears to be hitting its stride.?

Gina Chua, Semafor’s executive editor — and Smith’s deputy — was employee No. 6 at Semafor. The 63-year-old Singapore-born, New York-based veteran says that the feeling inside the company’s offices is that “everything is up for grabs on any given day.”

The challenge, she notes, for any company that’s growing quickly: How do you preserve that ambitious and adventurous spirit while still building??

“It’s like, how do you keep that sensibility while scaling and not having anything break,” she says.

Chua had been lured to Semafor from Reuters, where she had spent more than a decade in senior management. It was at Reuters, in 2021, that Chua went public about her gender transition.?

“It's profound that this happened to me as a 60-year-old,” she says. “It's also incredibly mundane because like, OK, I'm here. That’s it. I don't have to talk about it every day. I can talk about it every day, but I don't have to and I'm just here. And that's been both sort of liberating as well as very clarifying and uplifting.”?

Chua didn’t plan on becoming a journalist. Her first job in media, working as a correspondent for the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, was meant to be a pitstop on the way to law school. She took the LSAT. But she landed at Columbia Journalism School through a Reuters scholarship. She earned her masters in 1988, and she was hooked.

Following a stint back home in Singapore with Reuters, she took a correspondent job in Manila for The Straits Times in the early 1990s.

“There were all sorts of things going on,” Chua recalls. “It was my first job working (fully) abroad and there was a spate of kidnappings of Chinese Filipinos, an ongoing electricity power crisis and ever-present rumors of a coup. It was a really interesting time.”

A career in management beckoned, however. After several years in Manila and Hanoi, she joined The Wall Street Journal Asia (then known as The Asian Wall Street Journal) and climbed to the rank of editor in chief.

Who: Gina Chua

Resume: Executive Editor, Semafor; Executive Editor, Reuters; Editor-in-chief, South China Morning Post; Deputy Managing Editor, The Wall Street Journal; Editor-in-chief, The Wall Street Journal Asia; Correspondent, The Straits Times; Masters degree, Columbia; Bachelor of Mathematics, University of Chicago?

Here in her own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Chua takes us through her unique journey.

I was the first Asian to be editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal. There were some cultural issues. The previous editors tended to be American. I would go to, say, a printing class plant opening in Korea and, essentially no one would expect that I was the one who was the editor. If I went with my boss, a white American man, the security people would try to stop me from following them in. This was the late 1990s, remember, and I think the cultural references and the expectation that an Asian would be in charge of anything that was a Western organization, people weren't used to that. But that's changed quite a bit now.

I had this epiphany early on in my career. I was with a friend who was a very good forex trader. I would see the lifestyle and frankly the money he had as a very successful technical trader. He also had a lot of free time and could do a lot of things. I was thinking to myself, ‘You know, I have a math degree. I could probably technically do some of these things - why don't I have this life?’ Then it struck me. The thought of walking around carrying, I think at the time, probably $10-100 million of risk all day long, any of which could have turned against him at any point, was too much for me. So the point was not to go after what you think are important achievements or milestones or titles or money. A lot of what you do is the small moments of joy or fulfillment in your day. And that's what made me realize I couldn't do his job.

You should manage people the way they want to be managed, not the way you want to be managed. Obviously as an individual contributor, you can just write great stories. And if you're a manager, you can think about how you deploy resources and how to get ahead of where things should be next. I was never a fantastic reporter, to be honest. It's a very wonky way of saying that's how I became a manager and that's why I started enjoying it.

The broader issue about managing a creative is that while you can tell when someone's working at 50% of capacity and you can tell when someone's working at 150% of capacity, they can phone it in at 90% and you might never know. Sometimes, you might be unable to recognize the effort they're putting in. That's the tricky thing. Are you truly maximizing what you're getting out of them? Are they feeling as fulfilled as they can? And again, you don't know whether they're working at 90% and looking for another job or they're working at 120% and sort of desperately wondering why you don't know how much they're putting in. You have to be much more in touch with what each person's capacity is and, essentially, what their hopes and dreams are like — where they want to go, what matters to them. The real problem is how do you scale that, which is why large companies have difficulty managing through layers and layers.

I joined Reuters and moved back to New York in 2012 from Hong Kong. At the time, my partner was in New York too, we had done this long distance relationship so it was an even better chance to get back. I stayed in management. Somewhere along the way, I built the data journalism team, although I ultimately handed it over and I built the graphics team and handed that over as well.?

I remember in February of 2020, I was in London for Reuters for a set of meetings, including with my whole team as a global get together of bureau chiefs and managers. I remember things were starting to obviously happen on the COVID front and? we had a call together and I said, ‘So, what happens if everything shuts down? What are our points of vulnerability? Where are our fail safes? What do we have to do?’ We quickly came to the conclusion that we could work remotely in most places. I think we made a decision in early or mid March to evacuate the office in New York. And you know, I'm actually really proud of our response. We anticipated as much as we could under the circumstances. Our people on the frontline, especially the video and photography teams, were walking into ICUs — it was really quite a moment.?

I had made a decision to transition [genders] and told a number of senior people at Reuters in late 2018 that I was planning for this. The idea was that my transition would all happen in 2020 — little did I know [the pandemic would shut everything down]. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise in so many ways because, you know, when you go through a pandemic, in every meeting you have this much of me to look at. You're all virtual and you're essentially an avatar on a screen — you can be anything you want to be. So it was just a chance, as I said at the time, to grow into my skin without having to go to the office every day. So that gave me a chance to sort of settle into it. By that time, obviously, I told almost all the senior managers, I told a few people on Zoom, which was not ideal but, HR was fantastic and I got white glove treatment on the whole thing. We had this multiple tab spreadsheet of who was going to get involved and the how, when and what would happen. I know that's not everyone's experience, but it was mine. Not long after, we started to go back to the office one or two days a week, so I started to meet people in person.?

I was 60 at the time and I feel like I probably gained 10 to 20% of my cognitive capacity back. It's not like it was a drain on my life particularly, but you know, having multiple identities, having multiple lives, if you like, is a complicated mental exercise. I know for some people it is much more painful than I think it was for me. I had learned to compartmentalize early on. I'd spend a fair amount of time thinking like, who knows what and where and what do I say to people about what happened? This becomes a question that’s actually way more complicated than it needs to be. And it's more complicated largely because of society and other people, frankly, than it is for trans people. Necessarily that takes both a mental toll to an extent, taking a cognitive load just in managing the multiplicities.

I never really understood the word pride until now. Pride is the opposite of shame. It's like, you're not ashamed to be who you are. You're just proud. It doesn't mean you have to be arrogantly proud. When The New York Times interviewed me (in 2021), I wanted to make the point that somewhere out there, there's a 14 year old that needs to know this is not a death sentence. And I truly believe in the power of, I don't know whether the word is representation, but a visibility to understand that this is a life that is possible.?

What drove me to Semafor was that I had worked at large legacy media companies everywhere. I had just turned 60, and you know, it was post transition. We had a new editor in chief at Reuters and so I was sitting there and thinking to myself, ‘I could stay. It's a good job… I have a nice place… I know the job.’ But I knew if I stayed, I was going to be a lifer. So if I'm gonna move, I should move. And, you know, it's been fascinating being at a startup that’s fresh and different. You can reinvent anything every day.

We've really invented a new story form since we started, which signals this is a different way of looking at breaking news. It's a core thing of what we do now. We also knew we would have a robust events business, but it's been way more robust and successful than we envisioned at the beginning. We also have a particular design sensibility, certainly about the website and about the newsletters that we put out and we've already redesigned half our newsletters and we'll continue to look at the others.?

My job now is to make sure our systems continue to be robust and to also think about the future. You know, we have star reporters.? I was there to make sure that we could get off the ground with the systems behind the scenes, you know, so that the stars could shine. And I think we successfully cleared that mountain.? We've reinvented ourselves several times since we launched. And that's part of my job because every time we reinvent, we have to reinvent everything we do and how we do it behind the scenes and in front of the scenes, so it's fun.