Vera H-C Chan
Represented by Erin Clyburn of the Howland Literary Agency, aspiring fiction author Vera Chan is a past Eleanor Taylor Bland award winner. She makes her fiction debut with her short story MURDERERS’ FEAST in the MIDNIGHT HOUR anthology. By day, she parlays decades of journalism experience at Microsoft as senior manager, worldwide journalism relations and publisher team (Partner Growth & Happiness).
Her day jobs have taken her from features/A&E reporting at a local newspaper to Web trendspotting and content strategy to product management and publisher relations at the biggest companies on earth. A freewheeling storyteller, Vera has had a front-row seat at the intersection of journalism and technology to witness the fundamental change in information dissemination.
Welcome to the central repository of her words, written and spoken.
The Yahoo! Days
As a senior editor and Web trends analyst for the Web’s top destination for news and information, she wrote news features, celebrity interviews, pop culture columns, entertainment slideshows and trending stories for the Front Page and Yahoo! properties including News, Movies, TV, Food, Tech, Travel and Sports.
Through the Search Trends Program, Vera helped to define the voice of Yahoo! and brand development through media outreach. Using the Buzz Index, an in-house proprietary tool, she analyzed aggregated search data and other signals from millions of Yahoo! users to understand and report upon trending patterns, societal shifts and Web news cycles. She wrote material for weekly radio interviews (cumulative average listenership of nearly 9 million monthly).
A pop anthropologist specializing in interpreting online intelligence and search to gauge the cultural barometer, Vera shared news angles and cultural insight to reporters at outlets such as New York Times, USA Today, ABC, CNN, Oprah. She also appeared on radio talk shows and television as a Web Trend Analyst spokesperson, and held her own with Headliners on the Headlines, a San Francisco KGO hour-long talk show with comedians.
Behind the scenes, Vera was part of the editorial team who led global coordination among Yahoo! editorial teams for “tentpole & anchor” events, from awards shows to presidential elections to sporting events like the Olympics and World Cup. She shared best practices with international teams on audience intelligence (including SEO), workflow, breaking news protocol, and industry developments.
Under her editorial leadership, she grew the annual Yahoo! Year in Review. A list of the year’s top terms since 2001, she oversaw a team of freelance and in-house writers and worked with producers, editors, marketing, engineering, and global communications to create a year-end online magazine. For 2010 and 2011, total reach each year exceeded more than 1 billion, with pickup in print and broadcast.
Microsoft, past and present
Vera came onboard to Bing News as Chief Journalist. Despite the grandiose title, she served as an informal “deputy” of a small team of veteran journalists embedded within the engineering group to help product managers and developers build a trustworthy index featuring news stories from around the globe. The team’s wide-ranging work spanned detailed reviews of emerging pilot products, audience strategies, source authority, news search results and more.
She later joined Microsoft News Labs, focused on innovation and co-building technology solutions with the news industry. Innovation solutions included IDA, an Azure prototype to analyze massive unstructured data. Vera sketched the basic concept and wireframe, and a meeting with The Atlantic resulted in a pilot partnership to convert more than 200 years of paper archives into a searchable database. Other programs included data journalism training, which included working in special projects with groups such as the International Center for Journalists and Knight Center for the Americas, and Microsoft 365 for Journalists, a free customized training program for newsrooms with enterprise licenses. Vera also managed the industry relations outreach and oversaw Microsoft’s biggest presence at the Online News Association in 2019.
Currently she works at Microsoft Start (formerly MSN) working with more than 2,000 publishers and micro-bloggers representing more than 6,000 brands around the world. In 2021, a pilot opened the distribution service to new partners for the first time in several years and Vera partnered with groups such as the Institution for Nonprofit News to bring on local newsrooms.
Publishing
Her old-is-new-media background includes newspapers and regional magazines. In the area of books, she has contributed chapters to Asia in the San Francisco Bay Area and Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation. See here for more about her fiction work.
Specialties: content strategy, trendspotting, reporter, features writing, editing, search insights, media spokesperson, special projects manager, storyteller