Zing Tsjeng

Why organisations work with Zing Tsjeng

• A working journalist’s instinct for what an audience actually wants to hear, sharpened across VICE, the BBC and the i newspaper, brought to corporate stages where most speakers sound rehearsed.
• A four-volume body of work in Forgotten Women that pulls 190 named historical women into business and cultural conversations, giving inclusion content that is specific rather than slogan-driven.
• Co-hosting Good Bad Billionaire with BBC Business Editor Simon Jack means she can interrogate wealth, power and ambition with a financial-journalism register, not a generic culture take.
• A presenter’s hosting craft tested on Question Time, Have I Got News For You and Front Row, useful when the brief is moderation, panel chairing or on-stage interview rather than a solo keynote.
• An Oxford visiting professorship in Creative Media gives the academic credential to anchor talks on media, narrative and identity for senior internal communications and brand audiences.

Biography highlights

• Former Editor-in-Chief, VICE UK and VICE.com; launched Broadly in 2014.
• Co-host, Good Bad Billionaire, BBC Sounds, with Simon Jack.
• Author, Forgotten Women series, Octopus Publishing, anthologised by Brazen in 2022.
• Visiting Professor of Creative Media, University of Oxford, since 2022.
• Highly commended, British Journalism Awards 2020.
• Columnist for the i newspaper; contributor to British Vogue, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Dazed.

Biography

Inclusion content inside large organisations has a credibility problem. Most of it is either statement-led or driven by external pressure, and very little of it is grounded in the actual content of the histories it claims to recover. That gap is where Tsjeng’s work begins.

The Forgotten Women series is a four-volume project that profiles more than 190 women, scientists, leaders, artists, reformers, who shaped fields that later forgot them. Octopus published the books between 2018 and 2019; Brazen reissued the anthology in 2022. The work is research, not advocacy, and it gives senior audiences a vocabulary for inclusion that does not collapse the moment scrutiny arrives.

She runs a parallel journalism career that gives her a working register most cultural speakers do not have. As Editor-in-Chief of VICE UK she managed teams across the US and UK, launched Broadly, and oversaw video work that drew tens of millions of views. With Simon Jack on the BBC’s Good Bad Billionaire she now interrogates wealth, power and ambition for a mainstream business audience, with the show topping UK audio charts in 2024.

The credential anchor is real. Oxford appointed her Visiting Professor of Creative Media in 2022; she lectures in journalism at City, University of London; she was highly commended at the British Journalism Awards 2020. Question Time, Have I Got News For You and Front Row have all used her as a contributor, which is why corporate clients including SXSW, Web Summit, Netflix and Sky tend to book her to chair, moderate or interview at the moments where the room expects a working broadcaster, not a motivational voice.

Key speaking topics

• Hidden histories of women in business, science and leadership
• Wealth, power and the lives of billionaires
• Media, journalism and the modern news industry
• Inclusion, identity and cultural narrative
• LGBTQ+ representation in public life
• On-stage hosting, moderation and panel chairing

Ideal for

• CHROs, heads of DEI and internal communications leaders briefing audiences on inclusion with substance
• Brand, marketing and editorial leaders working on culture-led storytelling
• Conference programmers needing a senior journalist to chair, moderate or interview on the main stage
• Leadership teams hosting International Women’s Day, Pride or cultural anniversary events that need a credible voice rather than a generic one

Audience outcomes

• Specific historical reference points that make inclusion content land with executive audiences
• A clearer view of how wealth, power and ambition are reported and judged in mainstream media today
• Confidence in handling identity and cultural topics from a journalist’s evidence base, not a political register
• Practical reading on how stories travel in modern media, drawn from VICE, the BBC and national press
• A sharper sense of what audiences want to hear from leaders speaking about inclusion and culture