ASIA MEDIA WRITES – For the soon-arriving academic year at The New ASIA MEDIA Center, publisher of the prominent international e-magazine ASIA MEDIA at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, our fall lineup has now been set, and so we are very happy to announce the following major appointments:
1. New Managing Editors:
LMU Seniors LEXIE TUCKER and AMBER VERNETTI will take up the two key managing-editor positions effective the first issue of September. Both young women have been outstanding students at the university and have performed as consistently excellent staff writers on the online magazine.
The student staff roundly applauded their appointments. “As a team,” says Asia Media founder and editor-in-chief Tom Plate, in announcing the appointments, “they will bring solid judgment and editorial integrity to our twice-monthly international magazine. The prior managing editors – Jeremiah Fajardo and Stephanie Garcia – effectively raised the editorial product to a new, higher level. The challenge for Tucker-Vernetti will be to take it higher. This will not be easy but that is their challenge.”
2. New Advisory Group: To help guide Asia Media in years to come, an Interim Steering Committee has been created, with five founding members on the initial board. They include two tenured members of the LMU faculty, one member of the LMU administration and a top federal government official. They are:
GENE PARK, the noted Japan finance expert in the university’s highly regarded Department of Political Science, specializes in comparative politics, international relations, and political economy. Dr. Park has been a Japan Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a prestigious Shorenstein Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC). He devoted two years as a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance’s Policy Research Institute. His work on the politics of public finance in Japan includes the ground-breaking book “Spending without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Pubic Finance in Japan” (Stanford University Press, 2011). Prior to arriving at LMU, he taught at Baruch College, City University of New York, and did his undergraduate work at Swarthmore College.
JENNIFER RAMOS, dynamic and popular professor in the university’s highly regarded Department of Political Science, is a specialist in US public opinion and foreign policy. This scholar brings to the ISC a very wide range of international interests and perspectives, including studies on the causes and consequences of political change, with an emphasis on the role of ideas, norms, and identity. Current topics of concerns also include the intersection of religion and foreign policy, and issues of drone warfare and the preventive use of force, on which she organized a well-attended recent conference at LMU. Dr. Ramos’ recent 2013 book, Changing Norms through Actions: The Evolution of Sovereignty (Oxford University Press) presciently analyzed, among other issues, the role of “responsibility to protect” in shaping the new world order. Dr. Ramos did her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis.
BENJAMIN SULLIVAN, a key member of LMU’s award-winning web-design team, is the university’s senior Web manager, working out of the External University Relations department. He has been serving as our online publication’s executive senior editor and writing instructor to our student writers, with whom he mentors regularly. Mr Sullivan has also worked closely with founder Tom Plate on the site’s web design and with other technological opportunities, as well as on questions of journalistic practice and ethics. He did his undergraduate work at UC Santa Barbara, and graduate work at Mercyhurst College.
GREGORY F. TREVERTON, the former senior policy analyst at the RAND corporation here on the West Coast who was director of the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, is internationally respected for his work on balancing issues of freedom and intelligence and is frequently sought out as a consultant. His most recent book is the well-received and influential “Intelligence for an Age of Terror.” For the immediate future, Greg will help advise Asia Media from Washington, where he is to take up his new position as chairman of the National Intelligence Board. He completed his undergraduate work at Princeton.
TOM PLATE, Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies, is founder and editor-in chief. His undergraduate work was at Amherst.
3. New Executive Editor:
LMU GRADUATING senior and departing managing editor Asia Media JEREMIAH FAJARDO will remain with the on-line publication for a year as its first ASIA MEDIA Graduate Fellow. In that capacity he will assume the new position of Executive Editor. In this new role he will be responsible for the overall editorial evolution of the site, and with Plate and Sullivan, will work on issues of direction and development. Mr. Fajardo was an Asian and Pacific Studies major a well as a student at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is particularly interested in Japanese culture and politics and in the fall will be launching a new monthly column: YOUNG JAPAN – about the newest trends in one of the world’s most interesting societies.