Obituary: Kevin Drew – A Kind Man Who Taught Young Journalists They Belong
By Jennifer Jett
Images courtesy of AJ Lubinao at HKU
When people talk about Kevin Drew, the word most often used is “kind”.
Drew was a lifelong journalist, digital pioneer and cherished mentor whose career included eight years in Hong Kong, where he was an FCC Correspondent Member from 2005 to 2007. He died on 6 December, 2025 of oesophageal cancer at age 64.
Early in his career, Drew — who was born in Oregon — worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Associated Press (AP), including a stint as The AP’s correspondent in Slovakia.
He moved to Hong Kong in 2005 with CNN, after spending five years as a producer at its Atlanta bureau. In Hong Kong, Drew was CNN International’s supervising editor for the Asia-Pacific region, overseeing news of all kinds on the website.
In 2010 he moved to the International Herald Tribune, the international edition of The New York Times, where he worked as a reporter and editor as well as contributing to Rendezvous, a blog dedicated to global news and analysis at a time when blogging was relatively new to journalism.
During that time, Drew covered a range of Asia-Pacific news, including the 2010 Manila hostage crisis, tensions on the Korean Peninsula, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan. He also covered news in Hong Kong, including the 2012 Chief Executive election, domestic helpers’ fight for permanent residency and the 15th anniversary of the Hong Kong handover.
In addition to his own work, Drew was passionate about cultivating the next generation of journalists, teaching reporting and writing part-time at Hong Kong University’s (HKU) Journalism and Media Studies Centre.
Kevin Lau, who worked with Drew at HKU, said he was a creative journalism teacher. Drew once asked Lau and another colleague at the journalism school to surprise his students by bursting into his classroom without notice. They then started saying random, unconnected sentences, leaving the students “shocked and confused by the scene”.
“After we departed, Kevin asked the students to recall what we had said and to describe our dress. As expected, the students’ recollections varied,” Lau said.
“At that moment, I knew Kevin was always willing to use whatever resources necessary to teach concepts,” he recalled. “In that instance, students understood that people’s memories of the same incident can vary, a key lesson in reporting and the need for journalists to write notes during an event and not to rely on recollection.”
Drew spent one year as a full-time Associate Journalism Professor at HKU before leaving Hong Kong in 2013.
From there, he went to the University of Missouri to pursue a Master’s in journalism, with his research focusing on the increasingly urgent question of how news organisations should evolve their business models.
After completing his degree, Drew spent more than six years at U.S. News & World Report, where he continued to report and edit international news.
A young colleague of Drew’s at U.S. News said his support changed her life, and that he never made her feel that she “didn’t belong in rooms that felt impossibly large — from Congress to corporate boardrooms”.
In a tribute she posted on LinkedIn, Sintia Radu recalled that Drew told her “You’ll be fine. We all start somewhere.”
Since 2022, Drew had been working at the American public broadcaster NPR, where he was overnight supervising editor and “the man that took our urgent calls in the middle of the night,” said NPR host Leila Fadel on ‘Morning Edition’ on 10 December, 2025.
“Kevin lived as he reported,” his siblings Judith Bentley, Laura McKay and Keith Drew wrote, “with passion for people and a caring heart.”
Donations in honour of Kevin Drew’s memory can be made to the Portland Shriner’s Hospital for Children, where he spent time as a child after being diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, at donate.shrinerschildrens.org/fundraiser/6870340
