Entrepreneurial journalism in greater China and Southeast Asia
Exploring startup journalism and digital media platform trends in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, this book offers a practical insight into how to launch and run successful news operations as digitisation spreads through the region.
Drawing from a range of case studies of news and journalism startups, including Malaysiakini, Hong Kong Free Press, The News Lens of Taiwan, Thailands The Standard, Ciwei Gongshe of China, Indonesias IDN Media, Sabay of Cambodia and Frontier Myanmar, this book provides tips on how to launch a news media startup, how to find funding and how to sustain and scale the enterprise. Blending a theoretical approach with core business and newsgathering expertise, the author offers an engaging overview of contemporary entrepreneurial concepts and their vital relationship in finding new markets for journalism today.
Entrepreneurial journalism in greater China and Southeast Asia is an invaluable resource for both students and professionals interested in new media, startups and the Asian media market.
Judith Clarke worked as an editor and correspondent for Asiaweek magazine in the 1980s and taught and researched journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University from 1990 to 2020. Her research focused on news in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. She set up and taught HKBUs postgraduate course in entrepreneurial journalism.
Entrepreneurial journalism in greater China and Southeast Asia
Case Studies and Tools for Media Professionals
Judith Clarke
The cover image credit is Getty Images.
First published 2022
by Routledge
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2022 Judith Clarke
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ISBN: 9781138283084 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781138283091 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781315270432 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315270432
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Access the Support Material: Routledge.com/9781138283091
Contents
Preface
The idea for this book came about when I was assigned to write a syllabus for and teach classes in entrepreneurial journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2012. The academic staff felt at the time that journalism students were less and less likely to find a conventional job in media. Around us new journalism businesses were flourishing, and one choice for our graduates would be to start their own outlet. We were giving no tuition in this important contemporary aspect of the profession. On setting up the course, it became apparent that there were few texts and even fewer reference books on the subject. Those that existed mostly addressed western situations. With our student body encompassing not only Hong Kong but mainland China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, there was a clear need for more information on entrepreneurial journalism and a reference work for teaching the topic.
Research showed that in our region, despite political and economic difficulties, many entrepreneurial journalists were entering the field. Thirty outlets were studied for this book, and my thanks go to all the interviewees who gave me so much of their time to help me put their stories together as case studies for others who would like to follow in their footsteps. My thanks also go to the students, now graduates, and friends who worked with me, in particular Jiranan Hanthamrongwit, who helped with the Thai interviews, and Gabi Xu Wen and Wallis Wang Xueyang, who helped with those in mainland China. Thank you, too, to my colleagues, friends and family who encouraged me. Without so much support the book wouldnt have been possible, but I am solely responsible for any mistakes in its pages.
Judith Clarke
Hong Kong, June 2021
1 Entrepreneurialism, journalism and Asia
DOI: 10.4324/9781315270432-1
Introduction
This book is about digital startups in the journalism business in China (including its once-colonised Special Administrative Regions, Hong Kong and Macau), Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Its aim is to show just how lively and diverse the scene is despite the many constraints journalism entrepreneurs face. It covers all aspects of the business of journalism in the digital age and presents many examples from the region. Its goal is to encourage those who are starting out as independent digital journalism providers or are thinking of doing so, and to support those already on the way.
Entrepreneurial journalism
Background and emergence
Even today the combination of the words entrepreneurial and journalism jars for traditional journalists, who see their role as telling the public the truth rather than making money. Yet in fact, as US researcher Jane B. Singer writes, the connection is fundamental: [e]ntrepreneurialism gave birth to Western journalism, from the earliest periodical printers to the 19th-century publishers who turned fledgling news initiatives into empires (Singer 2018, 356). The link just got distorted in the 150 years those empires boomed.
In the early days, newspapers, like most other products, made money from sales. From the 1830s the emerging advertising business, seeking to reach potential customers for the new manufactured goods of the Industrial Revolution, found them the perfect channel to do so, and thus provided them with incomes often many times those they derived from readers. With well-off audiences the preferred target, advertising boosted conservative newspapers in the wealthier markets of the world into big businesses. They could improve their product with ever-more sophisticated machinery and pay professional journalists well to provide attractive content for mass audiences. Small papers and publications that appealed to poorer audiences fell by the wayside, while the reader became a consumer without any role in producing the news other than to pay for it (Curran & Seaton 1997, 3338). The arrival of radio and television in the 20th century only entrenched this advertising model because they needed even more expensive facilities, though the influence of broadcast meant governments took a role as regulators and, in some places, as providers themselves.
At the end of the 20th century critics had plenty to complain about. The big commercial publications and broadcasters were accused of pandering to consumers and advertisers through market-driven journalism that focused on sensationalism and trivialisation (McManus 1994). Whats more, the major companies, mostly American and European, were growing bigger through aggressive takeovers, reducing their numbers and threatening a media monopoly, as US academic Ben Bagdikian (2000) pointed out. The only sign of entrepreneurialism in the business was among the small lite running these huge media conglomerates. Then the whole industry was unexpectedly turned on its head by developments apparently beyond its control: the advancement of technology and, linked to it, the emergence of an invigorated entrepreneurial scene.
