About Asia, by Asians for Asians
Regional media alliance Asia News Network celebrated its 20th anniversary in Seoul recently, with the resolve to bring Asia even more closer together.
LAST WEEK, senior editors of Asia News Network (ANN) met with South Korean President Moon Jaein at the Blue House in Seoul to get an insight on his country and the third Trump-Kim summit. The Moon visit coincided with the network’s 20th anniversary in the South Korean capital city.
For Christoph Grabitz, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) Asia media programme director, the visit to the Blue Hose was exciting.
Grabitz noted that the fact that leading statesmen in Asia – prime ministers and presidents – in Asia have received ANN members is a testament to the significance of the network in this region.
Through its 20 years of existence, ANN has managed to meet up with Asian leaders during its annual meeting in cities around the region. For example, the editors had a meeting with Japan Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Tokyo in 2003, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in Singapore in 2014 and China Premier Li Keqiang in 2016.
“Whenever we had an editorial meeting in some city – most of the time – the prime minister or the president of the country would welcome us to their country. That showed the esteem they held us in,” said Datuk Seri Wong Chun Wai, who is a member of the ANN board of advisors and The Star Media Group special advisor.
ANN was born at Frankfurt Airport on a cold autumn day in late 1998. A group of Asian editors returning from a conference organised by KAS in Germany were “bored” while waiting for their flight, so they started discussing news collaboration.
“There and then they decided to offer news consumers an unmatched and truly pan-Asian view on regional events by setting up a unique mechanism for sharing news,” wrote Werner vom Busch and Dr Susanne RentzowVasu in their book, Asia News Network - 10 years.
“In the late 1990s, as we have seen, editors-in-chief lacked resources to send their reporters to every far flung corner of the vast Asian continent, so economic calculus played a role (in the formation of ANN). With Western reports dominating international discourse on the causes of the Asian crisis, the shared vision of emancipating Asian media from the traditional dominance of Western news wires in coverage of regional affairs, played an equally important role,” they added.
On March 19, 1999 in Bangkok, ANN founding members signed a memorandum of agreement.
The founding members of ANN were The Statesman of India, The Jakarta Post from Indonesia, Sin Chew Jit Poh and The Star from Malaysia, The Straits Times from Singapore, The Nation from Thailand and Viet Nam News from Vietnam. KAS is also a co-founder of ANN.
The then The Star group chief editor Datuk Ng Poh Tip recalled why her newspaper joined the network.
“When they were forming ANN, they contacted The Star and I agreed to be a member. It sounded like a great idea because we never had cooperation with other newspapers in Asia,” she said.
“And the ones which were mentioned who have agreed to join were the leading newspapers in Asia so it sounded really like a good deal. So, I said, yes, why not.”
Ng said the founding members hit off immediately. Everybody was really keen to make a success of the organisation.
Trust was key to ANN’s success and growth.
“The fact that we grew from seven members to 24 in 20 countries and managed to stay together all these years is partly because of trust. We have no formal organisation so everything is done on a support basis,” said Pana Janviroj, ANN executive director and the former CEO of Thailand’s The Nation.
He also said that ANN continued to grow because of digital technology.
“In the past, we use about 10 to 20 stories a day now we use around 150 stories a day. And this is possible because of the Internet,” he said.
The reach of the members is huge – via Facebook, it has close to 90 million followers.
During the formation of ANN, the late Felix Soh, who was then the foreign editor of The Straits Times, talked about how the network would be about Asia, by Asians, for Asians.
Janviroj elaborated on ANN’s tagline for the last 20 years which is “We Know Asia Better.”
“We are the leading media in our country. We believe that we know what is happening locally better,” he said.
Mahfuz Anam, the editor-in-chief of Bangladesh’s The Daily Star said ANN is Asian speaking to other Asians about ourselves.
“This, we think, is a fundamental difference from the way the international news agencies covers Asia. We can understand each other better. This way we can become closer and then way, this time, we have adopted our new tagline ‘Bringing Asia Closer’. This is a vital role that ANN plays,” he said.
According to vom Busch, who is also a member of the ANN advisory board, the network was a formidable factor when its members were bullied.
“Some politicians just love to lock away journalists. And when this journalist belongs to ANN, of course, all member would pick it up. So, they would have egg yolk of on the white shirt under white shirts, very quickly. And I think that that got around and then probably stopped some people who would have loved to lock away journalists,” he said.
One ANN editor who got bullied by his government is Anam, who is with Bangladesh’s most popular English-language newspaper. He faces 84 defamation and sedition cases filed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina government.
“It helps when ANN members stand together and make a protest and it makes a lot of impact on the national governments. It may not have any direct result right away. But at least the governments know that there are so many other newspapers in the region who are protesting what is being done to a journalist in a particular country,” he said.
In the Seoul meeting, ANN editors were amazed that the network has survived for 20 years. It was also amazing, for some of them, as some members were from countries which were once “enemies”. They toasted to another 20 years and that it will bring Asia closer.