Tom Plate is an American journalist whose international career has seen him working at media institutions from London to Los Angeles. Born in New York, he completed his studies at Amherst College (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he earned his master’s degree in public and international affairs. His syndicated column focusing on Asia and America runs regularly in major newspapers in Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Providence (Rhode Island) and other U.S. outlets.
He has received awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. In 1993, when he was Editor of the Editorial Pages, the Los Angeles Times garnered the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Los Angeles riots.
From 1994 to 2008, he taught in the communication and policy studies departments at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been a Media Fellow at Stanford University and a fellow in Tokyo at the Japanese Foreign Press Center’s annual Asia-Pacific Media Conference.
He was the founder of the non-profit Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), whose webpages migrated to the University of Southern California (USC) as ‘Asia Media’ and ‘Asia Pacific Arts’. He also founded and is currently director of the Pacific Perspectives Media Center in Beverly Hills, California, a non-profit organization under APMN that syndicates high-end op-eds and manages a website ‘Pacific Perspectives Front Page’ (pacificpersepectives.blogspot.com).
On the West Coast, he is a board member of the Pacific Century Institute and a Senior Fellow at the USC Center for the Digital Future, as well as a long-standing member of the World Affairs Council of Los Angeles and the Pacific Council on International Policy; on the East Coast he is a long-standing member of the Princeton Club of New York, the Century Association (recently resigned) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Tom is also the author of six books, including Confessions of an American Media Man (Marshall Cavendish 2007), now into its second edition, and which has been published in Korean and Vietnamese editions. He has been listed in Who’s Who in America and for years was a participant at the retreats of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. A former Franciscan seminarian, he resides in Beverly Hills with his wife Andrea, a licensed clinical social worker, and their four cats.