Veteran journalist and educator Yvonne Chua has received yet another recognition for excellence in her work as teacher, mentor, author, editor and journalist.
She is a recipient of the University of the Philippines Diliman’s 2020 Gawad Tsanselor Para Sa Natatanging Guro award.
The recognition is given to UP faculty members who have “outstanding accomplishments, and consistently demonstrate honor and excellence in teaching, research and public service.”
Chua is an associate professor of journalism at the UP College of Mass Communication. She has been mentoring future media workers at UP since 1995. She teaches investigative journalism, data journalism and fact checking and gives training in local universities and abroad.
In 2019, she led Tsek.ph, a pioneering collaborative fact-checking project that brought together 11 media organizations and three universities, including Philstar.com, to combat disinformation in the May midterm elections.
She is a co-founder of Vera Files, a nonstock, non-profit independent media organization. She and five other veteran Filipino journalists started the body in 2008 to take a deeper look into current Philippine issues. Chua initiated Vera Files’ fact-checking project, which started in 2016 as a project by her students during the presidential elections. The students’ fact checks were published in a section called “Is that so?” in Vera Files’ website. It later became Vera Files Fact Check, one of the fact-checking groups accredited by the International Fact Checking Network.
Chua continues to educate and involve students in efforts to fight mis- and disinformation, teaching a semester-long seminar class on fact checking and establishing FactRakers, a fact-checking project of UP journalism majors whom she supervises.
She has also trained reporters in investigative and data journalism, as well as fact checking, in several provinces in the country and in countries such as Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand.
Chua is a multiaward-winning journalist. She was part of the team that put out the investigative series on former president Joseph “Erap” Estrada’s unexplained wealth. This helped form the basis of the impeachment complaint against him.
She is the only journalist to date who has been twice-named a Marshall McLuhan Fellow, in 2000 and 2005, awarded to reporters “embodying outstanding qualities in the field of investigative journalism.” She is also a Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism’s Hall of Fame awardee, winning the grand prize three out of five years.
She was the Ninoy and Cory Aquino Fellowship Awardee for journalism in 2010. In 2015, she was the Titus Brandsma Philippines awardee for leadership in journalism.
Her citation said she was living “the best of both worlds of the academe and media practice.” She was also a Jose Rizal Awardee for Excellence in Journalism in 2003 given by Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran and the Manila Times.
Chua also was training director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism for over 11 years, beginning 1996. Her journalistic career began in 1981, during the later years of the Marcos dictatorship, as a reporter for the now-defunct Philippine Daily Express. She later became the city editor at the national broadsheet Ang Payahagang Malaya.
Aside from mentoring and training budding journalists, Chua has been helping as an associate editor of Tulay.