Jim Laurie Biography
Jim Laurie is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster from the United States best recognized for his work in Asia. Laurie joined NBC News in Saigon in 1972 to cover the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Jim Laurie Age
Jim was born James Andrew Laurie on 16 June 1947, in Florida, United States of America. He is 76 years old as of June 2023.
Jim Laurie Education
Laurie earned a degree in History and a certificate in Asian Studies from American University in Washington, D.C. in 1973. In 1973-74, he pursued postgraduate studies at George Washington University’s Sino-Soviet Institute.
Jim Laurie Career
Laurie began his career as a radio stringer in Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in the early 1970s. Laurie joined NBC News in Saigon in 1972 to cover the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. He documented the final phase of the Communist takeover of Vietnam on April 30, 1975, alongside cinematographer Neil Davis, residing in the newly renamed Ho Chi Minh City for 26 days. In 1975, his work for NBC News in Vietnam earned him the George Foster Peabody Award from the University of Georgia. From 1978 to 1999, Laurie worked for ABC News. His reporting in Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia resulted in the one-hour ABC News Close-Up documentary This Shattered Land, which aired in 1980.
Laurie founded the first American television network bureau in China in 1981 while working for ABC News. Later, during the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations and following repression in May-June 1989, he reported from Beijing. Other ABC News assignments included accompanying Filipino opposition leader Senator Ninoy Aquino as he returned to the Philippines in August 1983 after three years of self-imposed exile in the United States (witnessing the senator’s eventual assassination on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport), covering Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in Russia from 1988 to 1991, the war in Bosnia 1992-1993, and the elections in South Africa.
Laurie quit active television news reporting in 1999 to work in television management for News Corporation’s Asia network, STAR Group Ltd. Laurie has worked on a number of television documentaries and long-form broadcasts, co-producing, writing, and narrating them. ABC News Close-up is one of them. Japan: Miracle Myths, 1981; China: The Yellow River, 1988; Cambodia: Boom Town, 1999 (ABC News Nightline special), and Vietnam: Giaiphong, 2000 (a one-hour Focus Asia special on News Corporation’s STAR World Channel). Laurie was the Director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre’s broadcast journalism department at the University of Hong Kong from September 2005 until December 2011.
He also established Focus Asia Productions Limited, a Hong Kong-based consulting and production company, in 2005. He has advised foreign TV news organizations, including television channels in India, Qatar, Malaysia, and China. Laurie published “The Last Helicopter: Two Lives in Indochina,” a narrative of his early days in Asia beginning in 1970, and in 2020. Aside from the Peabody Award, Laurie has received an Overseas Press Club Award for his work in the Philippines in 1984, two Emmy Awards, an Armstrong Award, and an Amnesty International Media Award for human rights reporting.
Jim Laurie’s Net Worth
Jim has an estimated net worth of 1 million dollars.