Why news travels to Bangkok

Dominic Faulder reports on the Thai capital's leap into pre-eminence as Asia's new media hub.

By: Dominic Faulder

IN 1988, A leading Hong Kong weekly predicted that by the turn of the millennium, its largest bureau would be in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. That did not come to pass, and, ironically, a few years after making that prediction, the magazine closed most of its regional offices on cost grounds. Correspondents, it reasoned, could just as easily work and file from home using the internet and e-mail.

Home to many exiled Laotians and Burmese, Chiang Mai is nevertheless the main listening post for closeted Laos and Myanmar. But few correspondents live there. Indeed, any yearning to escape Bangkok is diminishing as the Thai capital gathers momentum as a regional media hub.

Not that Bangkok is ideal. "It can be hell for those who prefer Prussian order," says Denis Gray, a Bangkok bureau chief since 1975 for Associated Press. "English is more widely spoken in Hong Kong and Singapore, and Thai journalists with good journalistic skills and a high standard of English are rare."

Nevertheless, Bangkok is stealing the limelight from both Hong Kong and Singapore due rather, it seems, to a happy confluence of factors than to any conscious Thai policy. "It's the freest place in the region, and the most convenient," says Lin Neumann, a consultant for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. "It's taken on the mantle of the Hong Kong of the 1970s. Frankly, I'm surprised more regional media don't see it as the place to be."

Plenty already have. Britain's ITN, for example, relocated from Hong Kong after the territory was returned to China in 1997.

"The financial reasoning was glaring," says Asia correspondent Ian Williams. "The bean counters in London are happy. Our fixed costs are 80% lower than in Hong Kong. We've had tremendous co-operation from the Foreign Ministry, which was chuffed we'd chosen to centre our Asian operation here."

"We're a public broadcaster and have to be very tight with our funds," says Johnathan Head, the BBC's South-East Asia correspondent. Opened in 1998, the BBC's Bangkok bureau is one of its largest. "It's supposed to cover areas where we don't have correspondents," explains Head, who is just back from Cambodia. Apart from serving the BBC's routine English-language television and radio requirements, the bureau also houses correspondents for its Burmese, Vietnamese and Thai foreign-language services, and producers for its East Asia Today and The World Today programs. Just down the corridor is ABC Australia's bureau, which expanded after a move from Singapore five years ago.

"There's a critical mass of journalists here," says Head. "It is full of working correspondents and journalists," agrees Williams. Although vague about the exact breakdown (because of recent staff changes), the Thai Foreign Ministry's Information Department acknowledges that 362 foreign correspondents have registered with it, of which about a third are believed to be Japanese. There are countless other unaccredited freelance writers and photographers.

Back in the late 1980s, Bangkok was a choked, polluted, corrupt, inefficient metropolis where international phone lines cost nearly $US2000 on the black market; that is, if you didn't want to wait until "the afternoon of the next century", as the Thais say, to get one through official channels. But things were already changing. Most importantly, Bangkok International Airport was upgraded in 1987, the year of the "Visit Thailand" tourism promotion. This bumped up the number of carriers serving Thailand. Today, about 75 airlines, including exotica such as Air Kazakhstan and Druk Air (Bhutan) fly there.

Thailand has been competing effectively with Singapore's super-efficient Changi as an aviation hub. A larger, much-delayed second international airport is rising from a swamp east of the city. Despite the 1997 Asian crisis, Thailand has persevered with all but one of its big infrastructure developments: the Hopewell mass-transit project. The capital has abundant telecommunications, a new skytrain and, next year, will have a subway.

Most of South-East Asia is within two hours' flying distance, and there are regular services to India, China, the Middle East, and West and Central Asia.

If one company symbolises the development of Bangkok as a foreign media hub, it is probably Asiaworks. With cameras and crews for hire, full production facilities, and a professional studio, it has provided feeds to virtually every broadcast company in the world.

From premises once occupied by a trading house, it has catalysed the transformation of the penthouse floor of the Maneeya Centre into a humming media community. ABC, ITN, the BBC, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand are all there. The building also houses the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Straits Times, The Australian and others. With Agence France-Presse just around the corner off Ploenchit Road, the area is fast becoming an Asian Fleet Street.

Asiaworks has opened smaller affiliated offices in Jakarta and Singapore. "We're a technology-driven company, and our connectivity here is as good as anywhere," says Canadian TV cameraman Marc Laban, a quarter shareholder in Asiaworks.

Asiaworks feeds through fibre-optic cables to efficient satellite ground stations in Sri Racha and Nonthaburi. "We are the Communications Authority of Thailand's largest private customer," says Laban. "CAT has come on in leaps and bounds in the 10 years I've been here."

Former CBS cameraman and Asiaworks co-founder Derek Williams has been back and forth between Hong Kong and Bangkok since the 1970s. "Even in the 1980s, Bangkok was pretty primitive. You had to send a telex to New York and ask your editor to call you," he recalls.

Until the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh in 1975, Hong Kong was still the efficient "rear base", as AP's Gray puts it, for Indochina coverage. "It was not until the communist victories that Bangkok became a news hub; the frontline for coverage of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Burma," he says. Although the region is at peace, Bangkok continues to dominate coverage of these countries, particularly with Laos and Myanmar being so media phobic.

Cambodia is the most open of the four but is not a big enough story in itself to support a significant permanent press corps. "It seems to have fallen if we compare it to the UNTAC period (1992-93)," says information ministry spokesman Khieu Kanariddh. "Correspondents from Hanoi and Bangkok fly in to cover stories. I hope there will be a lot more when Cambodia establishes the Khmer Rouge trial."

Saigon is off limits for residency, and Hanoi is a hardship media posting with falling numbers. "Most media corporations don't feel they can justify much of a presence given the relative slowness of the yarn here," says a correspondent resident in Hanoi. "There are draconian bureaucratic requirements, and we're all under heavy surveillance, which includes tails, phone taps, e-mail interception and highly restricted internet access."

All of which works to Bangkok's advantage in a lucrative industry. Even allowing that critical coverage of the genuinely revered royal family is strictly taboo, Thailand's fundamental freeness is reflected in its vibrant domestic media, the largest in South-East Asia. A budding publishing industry further enhances its hub status.

"The Nation and the Bangkok Post are the best English-language newspapers in South-East Asia," argues Neumann. "The better elements of the Thai media have been promoting themselves around the region among Asian journalists." Indeed, it seems, perhaps unawares, the Thais might have something to teach us all about the media.