About reportingasean.net
Reporting ASEAN is a venue for the discussion of current news and issues around regionalism, including ASEAN integration, that highlights voices and views from within Southeast Asia.
ReportingASEAN.net and the Reporting ASEAN media programme it is part of are independent of ASEAN or any ASEAN entity, but encourages greater editorial investment by the media in the story of regionalism, and in storytelling, especially around under-reported issues, with a regional perspective.
While ASEAN and the ASEAN Community have received a lot more mention in the media and have better recall among publics in Southeast Asia in the last few years, news coverage of these remains heavily focused on following its summits, annual meetings and high-profile events, or are done from nationally-focused news lenses.
Far fewer newsrooms investigate the impact of decisions or policies made at the state and ASEAN level on the daily lives of the region’s more than 650 million constituents. Additionally, many media houses in the region have long relied on coverage produced by non-regional or western news agencies or syndicates, which follow issues of interest to their own audiences.
These ‘old habits’ often leave little room for in-depth analysis and investigation at a time when local is, in today’s interconnected world, also regional and global. After all, there is no longer purely local news when the old barriers between local, regional and global have all but disappeared in today’s online news venues.
ReportingASEAN.net is maintained by the news desk of the Reporting ASEAN media programme, which was set up by its editor and founder, Bangkok-based journalist Johanna Son, in 2014. Since 2016, Reporting ASEAN has been hosted by the Philippine-based Probe Media Foundation Inc,
In 2018-2019, Reporting ASEAN ran the Integration Series for Cambodia-Lao PDR-Myanmar-Vietnam (CLMV Integration Series). This capacity-building project was supported by the Lower Mekong Initiative regional programme of the US State Department (US Embassy in Bangkok) and the Heinrich Böll Foundation Southeast Asia.
BEGINNINGS
This page was first created in 2011 as part of the ‘Reporting Development in ASEAN’ project, the precursor program to Reporting ASEAN that was supported by the International Development Research Centre after its development by Son. She has covered regional issues for more than three decades and developed the project when she was still with IPS Asia-Pacific news agency.
Reporting ASEAN has three components: a feature series found here on this website, a media fellowship and a media forum/conference series. It also works on developing knowledge resources for the use of journalists and communicators on reporting on ASEAN issues, including in local languages given the major role of such in the region’s media context.
Reporting ASEAN has worked with nearly 50 journalists from ASEAN countries to date. It has held two media forums with workshops (2015, 2017) and one editorial workshop (April 2019).
PUBLICATIONS
It also produced the book ‘Reporting Development in ASEAN’ in 2012, as well as a content analysis looking at how newspapers in ASEAN countries cover ASEAN-related issues. Its recent publications:
Reportage Around ASEAN Issues: A Tip Sheet, 2019 (English)
Other language editions to follow
Founding support for Reporting ASEAN was from the Rockefeller Foundation. Past partners have included the Asia Foundation, the Canadian government (Canadian Fund for Local Initiatives), the ASEAN CSR Network, the ASEAN Foundation/Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund/Bangkok Bank.
Editor: Johanna Son – For information, please write: reportingasean@fastmail.com
(April 2020)
