Reporting ASEAN Welcomes Heinrich Böll Foundation as Partner
Reporting ASEAN welcomes Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF) Southeast Asia as a partner in its (CLMV) Cambodia-Lao PDR-Myanmar -Vietnam Integration Series 2019, a media training-and-reporting program for journalists looking into stories related to ASEAN integration and regionalism.
The Böll Foundation is working with Reporting ASEAN on several aspects of its CLMV Integration Series, including participation by journalists in the capacity-building aspect of the series that covers environment-related issues and an April 2019 workshop for journalists accepted into the program.
The Reporting ASEAN program will also be producing a reporting tool for ASEAN-related and regional issues. It will translate this editorial tool into Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Vietnamese and Thai, given that most media in the region – and journalism courses – are in local languages. It is a tool that newsrooms can use, to help introduce journalists’ interest in, and expertise on, reporting with a regional perspective, given that the ASEAN story is here to stay and is of public interest.
The Heinrich Böll Stiftung is the German Green Political Foundation, affiliated to the “Alliance ’90 / The Greens” political party represented in Germany’s federal parliament and based in Berlin. The Bangk
ok-based Southeast Asia Regional Office is in charge of the ASEAN program.
HBF’s participation complements the current partnership with the Lower Mekong Initiative program with the US State Department/US Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.
Reporting ASEAN is an independent media program that provides a venue for building stronger skills in understanding ASEAN regionalism, its challenges and impacts, in order to report better and more critically on these issues. Its current CLMV Integration Series focuses on the perspectives and needs of the four newer entrants to ASEAN, who are marking some two decades as part of the regional association.
Founded in 2014 by its manager/editor Johanna Son and hosted by Probe Media Foundation Inc, it has worked with some 40 journalists in several series and reporting projects, believing that journalism has to be done, not only talked about in conferences.
Core to the independent media program, is Reporting ASEAN’s development by, and participation by, journalists and its familiarity with the Southeast Asian context as a homegrown program. Reporting ASEAN’s founding support was from the Rockefeller Foundation, followed by cooperation with a mix of partners over the years. (END)
