Cezary Podkul

I’m a journalist based in Hong Kong, where I recently relocated after more than a decade working as a data and investigative reporter in New York. I teach journalism here and write for ProPublica.

Prior to moving to Hong Kong, I was a senior reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where I wrote for the paper’s financial investigations team – a special unit within the Journal’s finance section devoted to holding the powerful to account and exposing fraud, waste, abuse in the nation’s financial system and beyond. Prior to arriving at Journal in 2017, I worked as a reporter at ProPublica and before then at Reuters. My work has also been published in The Washington Post, USA Today, Business Insider, Huffington Post, The Center for Public Integrity, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Forbes, among other publications. I’m constantly on the lookout for great story ideas, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have one. Here is how to securely share a newstip with me.

I especially enjoy using data to tell stories. I find that my best work has an empirical spine to it, whether it’s from data I’ve gathered or documents that I’ve analyzed to tell a unique story. I instill that data-driven mindset into students at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where I teach data and financial journalism classes to masters and undergraduate students. I previously taught an investigative skills class at Columbia Journalism School in New York, which I used to shape my curriculum at Hong Kong University.

In my spare time, I like to tend to my garden, read and write fiction in between book club chats with friends in the U.S. and Hong Kong. I also like to learn new skills by attending conferences like NICAR and IRE, where I’ve also given a a few presentations myself (you can find some of my training materials and tipsheets here). I’m an active member of IRE and SABEW and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong and I’m a past president of the New York Financial Writers’ Association, where I helped launch the Impact Award for Distinguished Financial Journalism.

As you can tell, I love journalism and there’s not other job I’d rather have. I got my start as a reporter writing for The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania. I graduated from Penn in 2006 with a dual degree in Philosophy from the College of Arts and Sciences and economics from the Wharton School. After Penn, I did a brief stint in investment banking at Macquarie Capital and then completed the Toni Stabile Investigative Journalism Program at Columbia Journalism School in 2011, graduating with honors.

My education and early work experience basically boiled down to two things: learning how to write and think about business and finance. I’m glad I now get a chance to put those skills to work every day as a reporter.