Monday’s Wall Street Journal contained a Q&A I did with César Cernuda, Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific president.
Click through to read about the company’s new chief executive, cloud computing, growth in Asia — and Mr. Cernuda’s love for Real Madrid.
Tag: self_promotion
Yesterday marked three weeks since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing.
For the latest news, keep an eye on our streaming MH370 updates.
Meanwhile, I spent some in time Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere helping with our coverage, and wanted to share a few of the stories I worked on.
First, I helped out with an in-depth narrative piece telling the stories of some of the people on board on the flight.
The story begins:
As night fell last Friday in Kuala Lumpur, businessman Philip Wood hurried to gather his bags for a trip to Beijing. He had confused the dates, but his girlfriend in China texted him to make sure he got on the plane.
A group of Chinese artists capped off their exhibition at a local cultural center in Malaysia’s capital city with a day of sightseeing and a banquet lunch of duck soup, fried shrimp and pork in brown sauce.
Norli Akmar Hamid finished packing for her long-overdue honeymoon and posted a photograph on Facebook of her cat trying to sneak into her suitcase. The cat chewed the lining near the administrative assistant’s neatly folded blue T-shirt and beige towel.
All of them boarded Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -2.08% Flight 370 late Friday night and flew away shortly after midnight in the tropical night sky toward Beijing. Soon after, the widebody Boeing 777 jet carrying 239 people vanished from radar screens.
The flight manifest included Americans, Australians, Indians and passengers from a host of other countries. There were more than 150 Chinese on board, many of them tourists who belong to China’s burgeoning middle class. A country between Thailand and Singapore, Malaysia has emerged in recent years as a major transit hub and tourist destination for globe-trotting travelers.
Flight 370 took off carrying 239 life stories, each filled with moments big and small, ordinary lives soon to be swept up in a tragic mystery. Now, as the hopes for a miracle fade by the day, memory transforms the random and routine into the meaningful and momentous.
I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Separately, I wrote a short piece on pilots and aviation buffs sharing their musings on Flight 370 via blogs, Facebook, Tweets, and more.
I also helped with a story about chaotic scenes as Chinese relatives of missing passengers were separated from the media by security personnel.
In the video embedded at the top of this post and on YouTube here, I discussed the scene and some video I shot.
And finally, in the video embedded above and on YouTube here, I participated in a live Google Hangout with our Southeast Asia Bureau Chief, Patrick McDowell, and aviation expert Harro Ranter to answer readers’ questions about Flight 370.
Stay tuned.
And if you don’t already, follow me on Twitter, as I’ve been posting frequently Flight 370-related updates there.
Silicon Valley East? My @WSJD story on venture capital flowing to Singapore’s startups: http://t.co/LrUzFMfD46 pic.twitter.com/5Qaqo5bcUp
— Newley Purnell (@newley) February 26, 2014
I’ve been remiss in sharing some of my recent stories here.
In case you you missed it last month, I wrote an in-depth piece on Singapore’s increasingly lively startup scene.
Click through for an interactive feature on some Singapore-specific apps and a rundown of some local tech companies — and some potential challenges to the industry.
(The story is for WSJ subscribers only — if you don’t already, subscribe! — but here’s a non-paywalled blog post introducing the piece.)
Next up: How I’ve helped out with Malaysia Flight 370 coverage. Stay tuned…
Friends, I’m delighted to tell you that I’ve joined The Wall Street Journal/WSJD. (I tweeted the news a few weeks back, and wanted to share it here, as well.)
I’ll be working as Tech Reporter, Southeast Asia, based in Singapore. I’m excited to work with some of the very smartest people in the journalism world, covering important issues in this dynamic, populous region.
Posts will likely be few and far between in the immediate future, but normal programming will resume shortly.
As ever, thanks for reading.
Some posts you might’ve missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter, where I self-promote link to my work more often:
- A Chinese province is trying to solve its labor problems with robots
- Thailand’s latest political crisis is ratings gold for its many partisan TV stations
- How do you disrupt the finances of an Islamist group whose name means “Western education is sinful?”
- As protests rage, Thailand admits its rice subsidy scheme was perhaps a terrible idea
- Why a Thai noodlemaker is feeling Hungary
- What the fatal plane crash in Laos tells us about the rapid growth of aviation in Southeast Asia
The story is up now over at NewYorker.com. Give it a read and let me know what you think.
Just briefly, I wanted to share some stories I’ve written for Quartz of late:
Up now over at NewYorker.com: a story I wrote about the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s recent visit to the city-state.
I’m delighted that my recent NewYorker.com story, which I mentioned earlier, has made it to the site’s “most popular” list; the piece has been shared one thousand times on Facebook and has been Tweeted sixty times.
The list is visible on the right side of the home page, pictured above.
Up now over at NewYorker.com: a story I wrote about a Red Bull heir, a hit-and-run, and what the data reveals about income distribution here in Thailand.