Foreign Editor Douglas Jehl, Deputy Foreign Editor Eva Rodriguez, Director of Global Live News Josh du Lac and London hub editor Sara Sorcher today announced the latest staff additions to The Washington Post’s London news hub. This hub, in addition to another base in Seoul, will allow The Post to become a more global newsroom. Launching this summer, these operations will be staffed by reporters and editors whose primary focus will be covering live news for a worldwide audience as it unfolds in the United States and around the globe during nighttime hours in Washington.
The announcement follows:
Helier Cheung, breaking-news editor
We’re very pleased to announce that Helier Cheung will join The Post to become a breaking-news editor at our hub in London. Helier will partner with Sara Sorcher, the London hub editor, in launching a team that is playing a key role in our global expansion.
Helier is a high-velocity, digitally savvy journalist with nine years of experience as a news editor, reporter and writer for BBC News Online in London, Singapore and Washington. She has also worked as the BBC’s Hong Kong correspondent. In her current role, based in London, she helps lead a team of journalists on the BBC’s international website. She was deployed to cover the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and the 2018 Thai cave rescue, where her reporting was recognized by the Society of Publishers in Asia in the breaking news category. She has also led online coverage of key U.S. stories, including the Black Lives Matter protests, during a six-month posting in the United States in 2020.
In joining the new hub in London, Helier will become part of what is becoming a global newsroom at The Post in which responsibilities are handed off from Washington to Seoul to London to deliver fast-paced, top-quality coverage to a worldwide audience. The hubs will be responsible for news wherever it breaks during overnight hours in the United States.
Helier is a graduate of University College London, where she received an arts and humanities scholarship and was awarded a B.A. in English. Before becoming a journalist, she spent several years as a senior policy adviser, including on the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. In addition to her native English, she speaks fluent Cantonese, near-fluent Mandarin and some French.
Helier will start work on Aug. 16 after completing parental leave. Her baby has already been outfitted with a Washington Post onesie.
Jennifer Hassan
We’re thrilled to announce that Jennifer Hassan will devote her formidable breaking-news skills to our new hub in London, formalizing a transition that has already seen her move from the audience team to a full-time reporting role.
Jen is a high-energy and enthusiastic journalist who has demonstrated a well-honed knack during her five years at The Post for spotting stories people want to read. Her passion for writing about the British royals, it has turned out, is matched by our readers’ eagerness to read about them. (Among her most memorable work was this ALL-CAPS headline full of outrage over a now-infamous breach of protocol at Windsor Castle.) As a London-based social-media embed, Jen helped to navigate Foreign through partnerships with Facebook Live, Viber and other initiatives of the late 2010s while also demonstrating growing accomplishment as a reporter and writer. Together with Rick Noack, she was awarded Germany’s Golden Blogger award for foreign reporting in 2017 for their messaging app project surrounding the German elections.
Using her base in London to function as an early-warning system to the newsroom, Jen has identified numerous stories gaining traction in Europe long before Washington awakens. After initially dividing time between Audience and Foreign, Jen took on her full-time reporting duties in January, playing a pivotal role in our coverage of the coronavirus epidemic; police violence and other issues; and the epic saga of Harry and Meghan. Her coverage has extended to terrorist attacks from Sri Lanka to Manchester, England, and the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
In joining the new hub in London, Jen will be part of what is becoming a global newsroom at The Post in which responsibilities are handed off from Washington to Seoul to London to deliver fast-paced, top-quality coverage to a worldwide audience. The hubs will be responsible for news wherever it breaks during overnight hours in the United States.
Jen, who joined The Post in 2016, began her career as a U.K. social editor for the Daily Mail; she also worked as a global community manager for Viber, honing her knowledge of social-media platforms. She is a graduate of Brunel University, with a B.A. in English.
She is a proud East End girl who grew up in Walthamstow, London; her twitter handle, @guinnesskebab, is a nod to her Irish and Turkish Cypriot heritage.
Jen lives on the far eastern outskirts of London with her dog, Reggie (known as Reginald when he’s naughty, as in when he chews through Jen’s stilettos during Zoom calls). She will be a founding member of the hub when it begins operations next month.
Ellen Francis
We’re very pleased to announce that Ellen Francis will join The Post to become a breaking-news reporter at our hub in London, joining a team that will play a key role in our global expansion.
Ellen is a poised, intrepid, trilingual journalist with a passion for speed; she has excelled in stints leading live coverage of major global stories, including the Beirut port explosion. She has served most recently as Reuters’s deputy bureau chief in Beirut, overseeing coverage across Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Her previous work for Reuters included four years as a Beirut-based correspondent, with assignments that included frontline duty in eastern Syria covering the battle against the Islamic State. She has also reported from Jordan, Egypt and Japan, and was among the finalists for the Reuters Journalists of the Year awards in 2020.
In joining the new hub in London, Ellen will become part of what is becoming a global newsroom at The Post in which responsibilities are handed off from Washington to Seoul to London to deliver fast-paced, top-quality coverage to a worldwide audience. The hubs will be responsible for news wherever it breaks during overnight hours in the United States.
Ellen grew up in Lebanon, spent some time in Canada, and is a graduate of the American University in Beirut, with a degree in civil engineering, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before becoming a journalist, she had intended to become an engineer, and spent one summer in Paris supervising site work on a project for Électricité de France. She is fluent in English, Arabic and French and speaks basic Spanish.
Ellen will start work in London on Aug. 16 after relocating from Beirut.
Adela Suliman
We’re very pleased to announce that Adela Suliman will join The Post to become a breaking-news reporter at our hub in London, joining a team that will play a key role in our global expansion.
Adela is a multi-talented journalist who is comfortable on nearly every continent. She began her journalism career at Al Jazeera in Doha before joining the Reuters news agency in London and later the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where she covered humanitarian and climate change news. She has spent the last year on NBC News’s digital team in London covering breaking world news for an American audience. Adela has worked closely with NBC’s foreign bureaus and correspondents as well as multimedia, social-news gathering and platform teams. For the last 14 months, she has written on a wide range of subjects, including obituaries of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the global protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, along with the U.S. election, Hong Kong protests, British royal family news and anything else that happens during U.S. overnight hours.
In joining the new hub in London, Adela will become part of what is becoming a global newsroom at The Post in which responsibilities are handed off from Washington to Seoul to London to deliver fast-paced, top-quality coverage to a worldwide audience. The hubs will be responsible for news wherever it breaks during overnight hours in the United States.
Adela is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with a degree in law, and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before pivoting to journalism, she spent four years as an international corporate litigator for a top 20 U.K. law firm based in London, Dubai and Tripoli. She has traveled to more than 70 countries, including time as a freelancer in Libya, Sudan, and the United States; she has also reported from Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Jordan, and much of Europe. Adela grew up in Manchester and London but also spent long stints in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, where her father was born; in addition to her English, she is proficient in working-level Arabic.
Adela will start work in London in July.
