Hal Foster is a veteran journalist at the Los Angeles Times and other news organizations in the United States and Japan, and a longtime journalism professor. In addition to the LA Times, he worked at the Portland Oregonian and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was executive editor of Pacific Stars & Stripes in Tokyo, and wrote about the war in Ukraine for USA Today. He has a Ph.D. in journalism from the University of North Carolina, and has taught in the United States, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, where he was a Fulbright scholar.