We’re pleased to announce the appointment of two journalists to our Power and Accountability committee.
Yuan Yang and Brian Whelan will join JRCT’s Power and Accountability committee as experts, known as cooptees, who will advise on our funding decisions.
The programme, which has a media strand, supports those working for a world in which power is more equally shared and powerful institutions are accountable to wider society.
Yuan is the Financial Times’ deputy Beijing bureau chief, mainly covering China's technology sector and policy. She is particularly interested in the intersection of technology with politics, censorship, civil society, digital security and labour issues. She has written investigations uncovering the use of illegal student labour in global electronics companies' supply chains.
Yuan is the co-founder of Rethinking Economics, a charity headquartered in Manchester that campaigns to make economics teaching more relevant to the 21st century.
For the past three years, Yuan was an elected officer of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, which seeks to defend press freedoms in China. Yuan has a bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics at Oxford University as well as a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics.
Brian Whelan is a digital strategist working with organisations to build large audiences using original video. He is currently Head of Video for Times Radio. Before that he spent over two years as content director for JOE.co.uk, where he oversaw a period of expansion and pushed the organisation’s presence as a progressive, campaigning voice across social media.Brian was a programme editor, producer and acting head of digital at Channel 4 News where he worked between 2012 and 2018. While at Channel 4 News, Brian broke stories which included coverage of Britain's mistreatment of migrant detainees and the actions of far-right groups.