We’ve scheduled one more visualizAsian call before the end of the year, with publisher Lisa Lee and editor-in-chief Harry Mok of Hyphen magazine!
If you’re not familiar with Hyphen, it’s the 7-and-a-half-year-old magazine that offers, as it says on the cover, “Asian America Unabridged.” It’s not only a fine, high-quality publication featuring strong writing and editing and graphics, it’s one of the few national print media outlets that covers Asian American issues and pop culture, and it follows in the footsteps of many now-gone magazines, starting with the late, great A magazine and including such titles as TransPacific and East-West. Other mags currently being produced include KoreAm and Giant Robot, whose editor, Eric Nakamura, we spoke to earlier this year.
Our conversation with Lisa and Harry about Hyphen will be at 7 pm PT (10 pm ET) on Wednesday, December 8. Register here if you’re new to visualizAsian (if you’ve registered before you’ll receive an email with the phone and webcast information; you don’t need to register again).
Like many magazines for Asian Americans, Hyphen is struggling financially, but the quality of its stories is never in question.
We’ll speak with Lee and Mok about the successes and challenges of creating Hyphen. They both have a lot to say about why they’re committed to Hyphen.
Here are their bios:
For a day job, publisher Lisa Lee works in User Operations for Facebook, and has more than five years of nonprofit experience in marketing and communications for multicultural arts and cultural organizations.
Lisa joined Hyphen in 2007 and since she became the publisher in 2008, the organization’s annual budget has doubled to $55,000 through development and fundraising efforts that she has implemented and supervised. Under Lisa’s leadership, Hyphen has also embarked on marketing efforts that have increased Hyphen’s readership by more than 100%.
Lisa is also a frequent speaker on panels and at workshops on media-related issues for Asian American college students, young professionals and nonprofit managers. A graduate of U.C. Berkeley in Mass Communications and Theatre & Performance Studies, Lisa is committed to using her communications and social media background to help Hyphen reach a broad constituency and to create a more complex representation of Asian America.
Editor-in-Chief Harry Mok is a veteran journalist who wrote about growing up on a Chinese vegetable farm for the second issue of Hyphen and has been a volunteer editor since 2004.
As a board member of the San Francisco and New York chapters of the Asian American Journalists Association, Harry has recruited and organized events for student members. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a graduate student instructor in the Asian American Studies Department.
Harry currently works as an editor and writer in the communications department of the University of California Office of the President. He’s spent most of his career as an editor and writer for media outlets such as the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Newsday and the Associated Press.
