The New York University Business and Economic Reporting programme, which is financially supported by the Foundation, recently published the following interview in their newsletter:

Zoe Yuqing Han, a personal finance reporter at MarketWatch has been writing about everything that impacts people’s pockets since graduating from NYU in 2022. She’s covered Apple’s new savings account, how a prospective federal ban on gas stoves could impact Asian communities and why small-dollar loans are becoming more popular. Zoe chatted with the BER Newsletter about how she started writing about
personal finance and letting her identity inspire her reporting.

Q: Zoe, you’ve been reporting on personal finance for more than a year now. What stories are you most proud of?
A: I would say the most successful story I’ve done in the past year was a piece on how the ban on gas stoves would affect wok cooking and the Asian community. It’s not exactly a traditional personal finance story because when we talk about personal finance, people usually think about saving money or things that affect your money. I pushed the idea for the story because there are so many conversations about natural gas and it’s becoming increasingly political. I did not see an angle addressing some cooking methods, especially one that I grew up knowing. Cooking with a wok requires super high heat. Most of the time, that kind of heat and that kind of technique can only be achieved using a stove, or so I thought.

(Gas stove bans) are not only a political conversation or environmental conversation, it’s about your health and about cultural identity. In some ways, I feel it’s about the dignity of cooking because people have lived by this approach for so many years and it’s so integral to their daily lives. All of a sudden there’s buzz around bans and there’s a group of people brushed aside as players in this conversation. So, being able to expand that conversation and to include that perspective was just a very rewarding experience for me.

Q: You had a lot of audio reporting experience before joining MarketWatch’s personal finance beat. Why did you pivot?
A: Personal finance is definitely not a regular beat people think about going into business reporting because so much of it is reader service pieces. My editor has taught me that, as reporters for personal finance, our role is really just to help people. We’re just trying to help our readers answer ‘How is that going to affect my money?” This is really the question to ask every day. I’ve always been interested in the kind of stories that can localize the bigger impacts of international conflicts, international affairs, or macro level affairs to people because I truly believe everything is connected and everything is going to eventually impact every one of us.
When I was searching for jobs, I was not thinking about personal finance, but when I saw the job description and the focus of the beat, I said “This is kind of what I’ve been interested in doing all along.’

Q: It seems like you bring a lot of your interests and background into your reporting. What advice do you have for current BER students who want to do the same?
A: This is something that I’m also figuring out step by step. In order to do my work well, I need to figure out what’s important for me at the moment and what interests me, then I can really utilize my perspective to expand the conversation.
Coming from Beijing, I think it’s just really fortunate that I can kind of expand the conversation from an angle that usually is not included in the mainstream Western media. People usually do not get to talk about low-income or a less privileged group of people. I feel the reason I chose journalism is because I want to be heard. I know there is like a whole group of people where I come from that want to be talked about. Eventually, we will all find what interests us and you have to trust that those things that interest you, will also interest other people.