Award-Winning Journalist · Author · Executive Editor
TP Mishra is an award-winning investigative journalist and the founding editor of Bhutan's first news agency in exile. The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, CNN and The Diplomat have run his work. The New York Times and the BBC have told his story.
Articles
Dispatches on displacement and press freedom, published in international outlets. The deeper archive lives at Bhutan News Service, and his training guides are at Media Helping Media.
Story
He began reporting as a teenager in the camp and never really stopped. Here is how it happened.
His family, like more than 100,000 other Lhotshampa, is given a week to leave Dagana after soldiers detain his father for 91 days. TP is seven. He grows up in the Beldangi II refugee camp in Jhapa, Nepal.
He begins reporting for The Bhutan Reporter Monthly, covering seven camps across two districts by bicycle. Within four years he is running the paper as Chief Editor.
He helps found Bhutan's first news agency in exile and edits it for the next five years. The Bhutan Press Union gives him its award that year, and from 2007 to 2009 he hosts "Saranarthi Sarokar" (Refugee Concern) on FM radio in Kathmandu.
After two years of vetting he lands in New York, where The New York Times photographs his first days in the Bronx. He becomes a U.S. citizen in 2014 and settles in Charlotte, North Carolina.
He runs the Bhutan News Service's volunteer newsroom, which he helped relaunch during the pandemic with no budget and editors on four continents. He also trains refugee journalists around the world.
Delivering copies of The Bhutan Reporter Monthly. Photo: Laura Pohl, via Media Helping Media.
Core belief
“The right to share stories and seek truth must live on.”
He built a news agency where none existed, ran it with editors on four continents, and wrote the playbook so the next generation of exiled journalists could do the same.
How the newsroom was builtSpeaking & training
He works with universities, newsrooms and community groups. The sessions draw on what he actually did in the camps rather than classroom theory.
Handbook
TP wrote the handbook after eight years of building a media operation inside the refugee camps. It covers reporting, editing, fundraising and distribution in plain terms. Media Helping Media publishes the companion training modules, which refugee journalists around the world use.
View the handbookFeatured in
Reporters have covered him since the camp years: the paper's appeal for aid in 2007, his arrival in New York in 2009, and the resettlement debates in Charlotte.
The Charlotte Observer
WFAE 90.7
WSOC-TV
Reach out
TP is available for freelance commissions, speaking engagements and media training. Questions about refugee and diaspora journalism are welcome too.
