JURIST Journalist in Residence Program

Joyce Lau is the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2025-26 academic year.

Joyce is a senior staff editor for The New York Times, based at their newsroom in Seoul. She moved to South Korea in 2022 with The Washington Post, where she was a breaking news editor.

Most of her career was spent in Hong Kong, where she has family roots. She was a staff editor for The South China Morning Post and The International Herald Tribune. She also taught news writing at Hong Kong Baptist University, and looks forward to working again with students.

While in Hong Kong, Joyce spent many years volunteering for, and sometimes running, the Human Rights Press Awards, which honored journalistic work from across Asia. The HRPA—which was co-organized by the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Amnesty International Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association—later moved to the US.

She is a native of Montreal, Canada, and lives in Seoul with her husband and two children.

Vivian Salama was the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2024-2025 academic year. Salama is a national politics reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and in 2024 she covered Donald Trump’s presidential re-election campaign. She has covered US foreign policy and national security for nearly two decades, reporting from more than 85 countries. Since moving to Washington in 2016, Salama has covered the White House and national security for The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC News, and the Associated Press, with a focus on foreign policy. During that time, she broke a number of major stories involving the Trump White House, including details on the president’s first White House phone call with the Mexican president, details on the administration’s controversial travel ban, and President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland. She also covered the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Russian invasion in Ukraine (often from the front line in southern and eastern Ukraine) and the war in Gaza, traveling frequently to Israel and elsewhere in the region.

Jon Decker was the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2023-2024 academic year. He is the White House Correspondent and Senior National Editor for Gray Television and has been a member of the White House Press Corps since 1995. In 2015, he was elected by his colleagues to the Board of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Decker serves on the faculty of Georgetown University, GW Law and the UCLA School of Law where he is an Adjunct Professor. He also serves as a Media Fellow at the McCain Institute. Decker, a member of the Washington, DC Bar and the US Supreme Court Bar, is the only lawyer in the White House Press Corps.

Steven Herman was the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2022-2023 academic year. At the time, he was the Chief National Correspondent of the Voice of America. He is now the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation, located at the University of Mississippi. Herman spent more than a quarter of a century in Asia, including years of reporting from Tokyo and subsequently as a VOA correspondent and bureau chief in India, Korea, and Thailand. In 2016 he served as VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, based at the State Department. He later became VOA’s White House correspondent, an experience he chronicled in his 2024 book Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalist’s Story of Covering the President―and Why It Matters. His travels have taken him to approximately 75 countries, doing on-scene reporting from combat zones, civil uprisings, and areas struck by major natural disasters.

Professor Toni R. Locy was the JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2021-2022 academic year. She is a Professor of Journalism at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. For 25 years, she reported for many of the nation’s largest news outlets. She covered the US Supreme Court for AP, federal courts in Washington, DC, for the Washington Post and the Massachusetts State House for the Boston Globe. She also worked on an investigative team at US News & World Report, and she covered criminal justice for The Philadelphia Daily News and the US Justice Department for USA Today. She began her career as a journalist at The Pittsburgh Press. While earning an MSL degree at Pitt Law, she served as a student editor for JURIST. She is the author of Covering America’s Courts: A Clash of Rights, a journalism textbook on covering the courts and the law. Professor Locy served as chair of W&L’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications from 2017 to 2019.

Professor Jane Singer was the inaugural JURIST Journalist in Residence for the 2020-2021 academic year. She joined JURIST from the City University of London, where she was research lead and Professor of Journalism Innovation in the Department of Journalism. A former print and online journalist, she has been studying journalists’ responses to digital technologies since the mid-1990s. Singer is especially interested in the impact of digital media on journalists’ roles, norms, practices and products. Her previous academic appointments have been at the University of Central Lancashire (UK), the University of Iowa (USA) and Colorado State University (USA). Prior to earning her PhD in journalism at the University of Missouri (USA), she served as the founding news manager of the first national online service in the United States. She also has experience as a print newspaper reporter and editor.