Masato Kajimoto

Masato Kajimoto, PhD, specializes in news literacy education, fact-checking, and misinformation ecosystem research in Asia. In 2019 he founded a not-for-profit organization called ANNIE (Asian Network of News and Information Educators) to develop teaching and learning materials in news literacy specific to the media and political landscape and socio-cultural environment in the Asian region. As part of the initiative, he is currently running the student-led fact-checking newsroom Annie Lab at HKU Journalism. The news website is a verified member of the Code of Principles by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter Institute. He served as the leading researcher and co-editor for the paper “Information Disorder in Asia and the Pacific: Overview of Misinformation Ecosystem in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.”

His recent publication includes an entry on “News Literacy” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication and the five-country research for UNESCO titled “MIL education in Asia: Exploration of policies and practices in Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.” Before beginning a career in teaching and research, he worked as an online reporter and “Specials” editor (web producer) for CNN. Born and raised in Nagoya, Japan, Masato earned his bachelor’s degree in English and American literature at Chuo University in Tokyo. He holds a master’s degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia in the U.S. He obtained a PhD in Sociology from the University of Hong Kong.