Linda Boonyuen Owens is an Emmy Award-winning television news producer turned communications expert. Battle-tested in breaking news, global health and voting rights, today she leads organizations how to tell stories on digital platforms. She has ​served as a media strategist during Election 2020, led global health campaigns at the United Nations and crashed breaking news for ABC News Good Morning America.
Most recently during the pandemic the Los Angeles County Office of Education selected her as the public information officer for the COVID-19 testing team serving 80 school districts and two million students. To help schools fight misinformation, she produced a video series spotlighting student athletes, band students and school nurses who integrated testing and vaccinations in their routines to keep schools safe and open.
In 2019, Common Cause, a national democracy watchdog group, hired Linda as a communications strategist for eight states in the west region. During Election 2020, she led media strategy on voting rights stories including the push for mandatory mail ballots to protect public health during a global pandemic; redistricting legislation that takes the power to draw voting maps from state politicians and gives it to the people; and how being counted in the census affects the allocation of federal funds to communities for the next decade.
In 2017, the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism hired Linda to train the next generation of digital journalists in their master’s program covering text, digital and audio video storytelling.
Shaped by twelve years at ABC News Good Morning America, BBC, TLC, Discovery and PBS in New York City, Linda’s versatile approach to content creation comes from her roots in high-volume daily television where a story is multiplied into video, print and audio versions for digital platforms.
From 2012, Linda served as a communications expert at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City and the United Nations in Asia Pacific (UN ESCAP). She created intimate, on-the-ground content to inform, inspire and persuade delegates and heads of states to reach a consensus on global health campaigns. Her teams created multimedia for more than 190 countries in five UN languages. The UN has commissioned Linda to produce stories in Bangkok, Jakarta, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, and Beijing.
In 2012, UN Women hired Linda, as an American producer living in Thailand, to share her network television experience with their offices in the Asia-Pacific region. She developed a one-day workshop to train eleven UN Women country managers and their communications staff on how to think like a journalist and pitch stories to media organizations.
Before returning to the U.S. in 2015, Linda elevated Vice News coverage in Thailand. For Vice Fightland, she profiled Israel’s top kickboxing striker blow by blow at the historic first Muay Thai University World Cup in Bangkok. She also developed and produced a Vice documentary series chronicling the transgender movement for equal rights in post-coup Thailand, a nation known for its fluid gender identity.
In 2005, ABC News Good Morning America hired Linda as a one-woman band to shoot and produce post-Hurricane Katrina stories of recovery along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. After Katrina, she began crashing breaking news stories for correspondents and GMA anchors Diane Sawyer, Robin Roberts and Chris Cuomo.
During her five years at the top-rated morning show in America, Linda produced over 1,000 stories making her the most prolific producer during her tenure. She covered the Virginia Tech shootings, climate change in the Arctic, U.S. troop homecomings from Iraq, male breast cancer, and avalanche survivors. Linda was honored as part of the GMA team that won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Morning Program in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
In 1998, Linda moved to New York City to attend the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She wrote her masters thesis on the passing of a hate crimes law in New York State. For the next twelve years, she remained in Manhattan finessing her craft as a storyteller in news and entertainment, before her transition to communications brought her to Bangkok, San Francisco and now Los Angeles.
