ASIAN NEWS AGENCIES RELY MORE ON EACH OTHER FOR NEWS ABOUT ASIA

From Ahmad Zukiman Zain

SEOUL, April 23 (Bernama) -- Asian news agencies' once heavy reliance on
major Western news wires to carry news about Asia appears to have changed, a
research on the new trend in Asian news flows has revealed.

Prof Choi Young Jae of South Korea's Hallym University, who conducted the
research on nine Asian news agencies over a 10-day period last July, said most
of the news about Asia, relayed by news agencies, now came from fellow Asian
counterparts.

"Even North American and European news stories are mostly coming from Asian
news agencies. In other words, Asian news agencies produce Asian, American and
European news stories on their own," he told the Organisation of Asia Pacific
News Agencies (OANA) Summit Congress here.

The research project was to determine the degree and how the news agencies
which included Bernama, the Malaysian national news agency, report about Asia.

The other agencies were South Korea's Yonhap, host of the four-day summit
here, Xinhua (China), Kyodo (Japan), Philippines News Agency (PNA), Press Trust
of India (PTI), Thai News Agency (TNA), Antara of Indonesia and Vietnam News
Agency (VNA).

Choi said another important finding of the study was that Asian news
agencies tended to portray Asia not so negatively but fairly, in keeping with
their neutral stands.

"Asian news agencies (now) have their own voices in covering Asia and the
world, competing with their Western counterparts," said Choi, who is also a
board member of South Korea's News Agency Promotion Foundation.

Having achieved success in the text news services, he said the summit could
be a springboard for the 40-member OANA to cooperate in multi-media contents.

He noted that the agencies were moving into multi-media platform by having
television news, Internet services and smart phones television applications.
-- BERNAMA