Thread by @michaelluo

"the newspaper hired Edwin Chen, the first Asian American reporter to join the paper’s Metro staff. Chen, hired as a science writer in 1979, remembers being met by an editor on his first visit to the Metro newsroom with the greeting, “It’s Charlie Chan!” latimes.com/opinion/story/…

"we can’t rely only on Asian Americans to cover the full breadth of Asian America. For one thing, not everyone wants that job."

"Chen, for instance...aspired to join our Washington bureau to pursue his passion for government and politics. He got there in 1989 and subsequently covered science, the Iraq war, presidential campaigns and the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations..."

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders should be part of the warp and woof, as Matsuda says, of our overall coverage. The question isn’t really how to cover Asian Americans; it is how to cover Los Angeles, because we, along with other racial and ethnic communities, are Los Angeles

Just a note that I was briefly part of the Capitol Hill press corps (fall of 2007) and @echen32 was even then one of the few non-white reporters there.