Download: Reportage Around ASEAN-Related Issues: A Tip Sheet
BANGKOK, Jan 18 (Reporting ASEAN) – ASEAN. Whether you love reporting on it, or would rather flee from it, the ASEAN Community will continue to stay within the news radar of Southeast Asia’s media and journalists.
This handy booklet takes not only journalists but students and followers of foreign policy, media and development, or anyone who needs to get past ASEAN jargon, down a media trip consisting of tips and concepts to demystify ASEAN issues, as well as minefields to avoid.
In the introduction, its writer, Reporting ASEAN founder/editor Johanna Son, says that the contents of ‘Reportage Around ASEAN Issues: A Tip Sheet’, come from insights and experiences from over three decades of following ASEAN/regional issues and many years in skills-building programs with journalists from the region. It is meant to be a practical training and learning tool.
The tip sheet can be downloaded here.
In his foreword to the tip-sheet booklet, former Philippine Foreign Secretary Roberto R Romulo said: “The media have a critical role to play in fostering this sense of identity and in popularising ASEAN issues, but this will require journalists to think beyond national borders.”
“I hope this effort is useful in developing more ASEAN-specialized journalists, which we currently lack,” added Romulo, whose tenure Son had covered in the early nineties in Manila, Philippines.
Kavi Chongkittavorn of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) Thailand and a columnist for the ‘Bangkok Post’, 
shared his views thus: “This little book is a magic key with which to open all the doors to better reporting and understanding of ASEAN.”
“This little book is a magic key with which to open all the doors to better reporting and understanding of ASEAN.” – Kavi Chongkittavorn, veteran ASEAN watcher and ‘Bangkok Post’ columnist
Moe Thuzar, a fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said of the tip sheet: “This is an essential primer on ASEAN for understanding what the Association is or is not and what it can or cannot do. It is even more essential as an aid for all those who wish to write about and discuss ASEAN intelligibly and intelligently.”
The tip sheet is one of the two knowledge outputs of the CLMV Integration Series (2018-2019) of the Reporting ASEAN program, which is hosted by Probe Media Foundation Inc.
The booklet is also being translated into Khmer, Lao, Burmese, Vietnamese and Thai. These versions are expected to be available online in February 2020. For information, email reportingasean@gmail.com or reportingasean@tutanota.com.
The production of ‘Reportage Around ASEAN-related Issues: A Tip Sheet’ was done with the support of the Lower Mekong Initiative, with complementary support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation Southeast Asia.
(END/RA)
