Chan’s honours include a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, a George Polk Award for journalistic excellence and an International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists. She taught
at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was on the board of the Asian American Journalists Association. Chan has a bachelor’s degree (social sciences) from HKU and a Masters from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Source: Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong

The newspaper has scooped up a number of awards in 2009, including those for reporting and photography at the Society of Publishers in Asia’s annual competition.

As the post reported about itself:

Vandy Rattana, Chhay Channyda and Rick Valenzuela took the Excellence in News Photography award for their coverage of Boeung Kak lake, where a private company is reclaiming the natural reservoir to build a commercial and residential project, affecting more than 4,000 families. The judges said the essay and singles were “striking, heartbreaking images that are also visually complex”.

May Titthara and Christopher Shay won the award for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting for their article “Escape from Hell on the High Sea: Nine trafficked Men Return Home”, on 17 men repatriated from Malaysia after having escaped forced labour on a Thai fishing boat. The judges called the report “enterprising work from a small publication”.

The Post’s publisher, Ross Dunkley, and its managing editor, Seth Meixner, received the awards at the Hong Kong ceremony. The newspaper had entered submissions from its daily-newspaper coverage, which began in August after more than a decade as a fortnightly paper, in the group for English-language local newspapers and magazines with a circulation less than 50,000.

(With Marketing magazine fighting Media magazine it can get somewhat confusing. Can someone please tell these guys to think up more creative titles for their publications?)

Founded out of Singapore by Randles in 2002, Marketing Magazine is intended to attract marketing, advertising and media professionals in Asia. The publication has opened up market-by-market using an online first strategy. If the online audience seems to justify the investment, they launch a publication, as they recently did in Hong Kong in 2007.

Media Magazine, published by industry giant Haymarket, just doesn’t match the ambitions of Marketing Magazine, Randles said.

“Their approach is pretty much one magazine for Asia, whereas we treat each country as a separate and parochial market,” Randles said. “When we go into one market, such as Singapore, we really focus on the needs of our target audience in that particular market.”

In the second video, Matt Eaton, editor of Marketing Magazine for Hong Kong, explains his editorial approach to the market.

Update from Eaton: Marketing will soon be audited in Hong Kong. They currently claim a print run of 9500 mags for Hong Kong and added another 1116 email addresses added in China this week to make for a total of 8500 e-newsletters going out each weekday in Hong Kong and China

Anyone from Media Magazine available for comment?

More on Randles’ market-entry strategy in a previous posting Justin Randles: 4 ways the Internet has changed niche publishing.

This is a further installment of my postings on English language publishing in Asia.

Mike has covered media for more than ten years, including six years in Britain before coming out to Hong Kong about four years ago.

His publication, which covers developments about the media in Asia, differentiates itself through depth of coverage, Mike said. The publication is closely associated with Media Partners Asia, a consultancy that specializes in analyzing Asian media markets. They put out thick publications on a range of topics. They have a sister site: Media Research Asia.

While the publication comes out about four times per year, Mike updates The Asia Media Journal blog regularly.

Not convinced? See video for more.

SOPA honored Asia’s best journalists for their outstanding work.

(Apparently, however, the Society of Publishers in Asia did not seek proofreading help from the Society of Copy Editors in Asia.)

FEER blogged what many writers and editors in the audience must have been thinking: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

The Awards for Editorial Excellence have grown considerably in size and stature in recent years.

I have been involved in judging the awards for more than six years and remember when we had only a few entries from a several countries. Tonight’s awards were handed out at a pace of one per minute for great journalism done in countries across the region.

Keynote speaker Ching Cheong (in photo above), the Straits Times journalist jailed for 1,000 days in China, spoke about the importance of the values held in Hong Kong, particularly in relation to protest and free expression.

Earlier in the day I co-organized a lunch on the Future of Media in Asia that was packed with a very high level audience and included panelists who were wonderfully combative.

The Asia Media Journal covers developments about the media in Asia and differentiates itself through depth of coverage, Mike said. The publication is closely associated with Media Partners Asia, a consultancy that specializes in analyzing Asian media markets. They put out thick publications on a range of topics.

In a nutshell, French said (blog posting here or video here)hat Doctoroff falsely claims a pioneering role in opening China in his book Billions: Selling to the new Chinese consumer.

The real pioneer, French said, is Carl Crow, a Shanghai adman in the 1920s and 1930s who introduced Buick and other brands to China. French recently published the book Carl Crow, a tough old China hand.

Doctoroff’s reply to French:

Thomas,

I don’t know what to say. I believe the posting is unbalanced and the tone is bully-boy cocky.

How does one respond to a sweeping statement — at least my book, on the first page, warns of “generalizations” — that yours truly is “wrong about China.”

And then he rails against me, sarcasm dripping, for having the audacity to call myself a “pioneer” when Carl Crow had already seen “everything.” He’s playing a gotcha game gone bad.

First, I have never called myself a pioneer. And, by the way, no one “took credit” (or implied involvement) for launching Buick. We did not even do that work. Bates did.

Second, Carl Crow was man of ahead of his time — yes, he was a “pioneer” and blessed with extraordinary insight and observational skill. However, he did not see “everything.”

The world has changed just a bit in 75 years.

He did not see a middle class boasting 150 million people and an auto market with 6 million passenger cars sold per year. He did not see a mass market — now penetrating the rural fringe — snapping up mobile phones and using them to transform their lives. He did not see multinational corporations setting up R&D centers and manufacturing scale on the mainland. He did not see that extraordinary release of energy that resulted from the embrace of capital markets.

For anyone to assume that “everything” has been seen before discredits that extraordinary genius of the Chinese people and their ability to adapt to an evolving world without sacrificing their enduring cultural orientation.

It also denigrates the efforts of, yes, expatriate businessmen who, while far from perfect and certainly not always noble, have done their part to make China a more dynamic place as the 21st century unfolds.

Tom Doctoroff

Dan, a former newspaper writer in America’s Bible belt, came to China in 2002 and started an urban blog called Shanghai Diaries. Seeing the popularity of the site – and lack of such a site for Shanghai – Washburn approached the Gothamist team in New York.

Taking advantage of the City-ist network’s name, Dan started launched the Shanghaiist, which has turned into one of China’s most popular English-language blog/portals. There is no sharing of advertising across the city-ist network, but a number of the English-language portals in China have considered teaming up to make themselves a single sale for an ad rep. (Not a bad approach, in my view.)

As Dan concentrated in 2007 more on his book about golf in China, Par for China, Kenneth Tan joined the team to make sure the site is updated half a dozen times per day. Kenneth runs the site while selling men’s underwear from a disused bomb shelter in Shanghai’s French Concession.

Singaporean-born, Tan has been in Shanghai since 2003.

Dan has lived in China since 2002.

The site was founded in part as a counter to the trend by many regional publications of dumbing down and slashing their coverage of Asia.

Those involved in the launch included John Berthelsen, a former correspondent at the Asian Wall Street Journal who serves as Editor of Asia Sentinel; Philip Bowring, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic review and columnist for the International Herald Tribune; A. Lin Neumann, the former Executive Editor of Hong Kong’s Standard newspaper; and Anthony Spaeth, a former Time Magazine Asia regional correspondent who left the Sentinel to work for Bloomberg.

Launched in August 2006 by a group of veteran and prominent Asia correspondents (more background here), Asia Sentinel is intended to fill a void left by the closure of such publications as AsiaWeek and the weekly edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Slate.com meets The Far Eastern Economic Review (the weekly version)

“Regional magazine journalism is dead, so we want to fill that void,” Berthelsen said. “Our target are the more in depth investigative pieces that nobody does anymore.”

Asia Sentinel’s ideal kind of articles:

1- The inside story of Thai coup: The King and the role of Prem, his longtime advisor.

2- Murder of the Mongolian translator in Malaysia (“We’re the only ones keeping this story alive and tying it to government officials.”)

Operational details:

- 35 contributors from around the region. (Who get paid, Berthelsen said, “peanuts”)

- New stories are supposed to be posted twice per day.

- A tie-up with the International Herald Tribune gives Asia Sentinel a space for their headlines on www.iht.com

- 7,000 unique visitors per day. This is well short of the 30,000 per day which Berthelsen said would generate US$10,000 per month to make an advertising model viable.

Long-term view is for Asia Sentinel

Tie-up with a journalistic company looking for a presence in Asia. One model is to offer Asia Sentinel Consulting, along the lines of the Australian site Crickey.au, which offers a free news site, archives and paid in depth custom research.

Traffic frustrations
“We ran a great piece on the shambolic state of Indonesia’s air traffic system just one week before the Air Adam crash and it only got several hundred hits,” Berthelsen said. “Our Edison Chen coverage, on the other hand, shut down the site twice, with more than 13,000 hits in a single day.”

Other overlooked stories include a series of pieces on a US$200 million slush fund scandal related to Samsung. The top traffic topics now seem to be those involving Malaysia and politics.

Lessons learned about coverage: “Every now and then we clearly need to have sex, drugs and rock and roll.” (As of May 2, 2008, the Edison Chen story had 125,000 hits.)

View of the AsiaTimes, a website at atimes.com aimed at covering Asia news

“They are both polemical and act like a whale,” Berthelsen said. “They take in all plankton and do not practice the same standards of journalism as us.”