Will Ripley is an award-winning Senior International Correspondent for CNN, based in Taipei.

Ripley has led CNN’s recent coverage of Taiwan, securing an exclusive interview with President Tsai Ing-wen and reporting on the growing tensions between the island and Beijing.

He has also reported extensively on the ongoing economic crisis in Sri Lanka, securing an exclusive interview with the acting President Wickremesinghe in 2022.

Before moving to Taipei, Ripley was based in Hong Kong. He reported on some of the biggest stories from the region in recent years, including Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, the Tokyo Olympics, the coronavirus pandemic, and the Hong Kong protests.

Before moving to Hong Kong, Ripley was CNN’s Tokyo-based correspondent. He reported on the devastating floods in Joso, the execution of two Japanese ISIS hostages, the deadly eruption of Mt. Ontake and the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.

A journalist with over 21 years of experience, Ripley has travelled to North Korea 19 times since 2014 — more than any American TV correspondent. He has reported exclusively from Pyongyang after missile launches and nuclear tests and was the only American journalist in North Korea when U.S. prisoner Otto Warmbier was released just days before his death in 2017.

Prior to CNN, Ripley spent nearly 15 years working in newsrooms across the United States. He started as a student news reporter in Connecticut before heading to Missouri, Texas, and Colorado.

Throughout his career, Ripley has won numerous accolades including Best Single News Story at the Asian Academy Creative Awards in 2018 for his reporting on the destruction of the remote Punggye-ri nuclear test site in North Korea. He also received the award for Best Documentary at the Asian Academy Creative Awards for his exclusive CNN documentary Secret State: Inside North Korea.

Ripley has also been recognized with four Regional Edward R. Murrow awards and a Heartland Regional Emmy award. He was honored by the Texas Association of Broadcasters with the Steve Pieringer award for outstanding valor in news coverage.

Ripley grew up in Manchester, Connecticut and graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia.