Media

Mobilising Asia Skills Conference, March, 2000

MEDIA/JOURNALISM

by Miss Louise Williams
Sydney Morning Herald, Former Foreign Correspondent

by Mr Peter Mares
Presenter of "Asia-Pacific" Program, ABC Radio

Louise Williams

The most useful advice I was given (re. Asia skills) before I went to the Philippines as a correspondent in 1986 when I was all of 24 years old and had come out of uni with some fairly strong and judgemental opinions. My father used to say to me ãnever walk into a room talkingä, so I took that with me and it was a truism which has been very useful in Asia. So the first thing I would say is listen, donât talk, then maybe you might want to venture your opinion.

I first went to Asia in 1986 to the Philippines when the Marcos government was crumbling. I took with me a very small computer with a four-line screen and a 32K memory and that was the pinnacle of communication equipment. It had something called a ãcuplaä which you had to physically plant onto the phone, which didnât often work. That was the beginning of the revolution which has completely changed the communication industry and, in doing so, journalism. We have to think about journalism in a new global environment on mobile phones, satellite phones and reliable laptop computers. In the past, just getting information out of under-developed nations with poor infra-structure was news in itself. It was just so damned difficult.

Reuters had invented the famous book of contractions so you could send the most info with the least amount of characters over a clunky telex machine and basically all you had to say was ãthe war has startedä. Now information itself is not news, we have far too much information about more topics than we could ever digest flying around the world rapidly. Satellite phones have broken the last frontier, we saw that in East Timor. I would argue that the outcome of East Timor last year with the intervention of Australian lead forces was the direct impact of telecommunications.

In 1975 we couldnât tell the story because nobody could get in there and nobody could get any information out. Those who stayed behind stayed behind on satellite phones and when the Indonesians crashed the information system including the mobile phones, they could still get their information out and the other way it worked as well, Falantil had satellite phones in the mountains so if you had the number you could dial in from the news desk at Sydney which was extraordinary and get a first hand account of what happened and who died.

Another very important development for Asia as a region is the internet and Iâve just finished a ** in Indonesia and during the last years and months of the Suharto regime we were getting all sorts of information on the internet from opposition groups which couldnât be controlled by the government. Demonstrations were organised over the net, journalists were alerted to what was going on, critical arguments were circulated and so the opposition had a voice even if it could only be picked up by the foreign press at that time with the restrictions on local newspapers. The same is true in Malaysia, where you have a very vibrant alternative media on the net that you can access; Free Malaysia, Malaysia Kini, any of the sites you can just key in as a Western journalist to find out what the opposition is doing. The same exists to a lesser extent because of stricter controls in China, Singapore, Vietnam and Laos.

I guess in talking about journalism in Asia we have to look at the questions that technology has raised for foreign correspondents everywhere, and that is ãwhat is our job in the information age?ä News as such is not enough and I know this from working on the Sydney Morning Herald foreign pages and thinking ãwell what are we going to run today. If we run that story on Indonesia, it has already been on every television station and every radio station or on everybodyâs internet search or on their mobile phoneä. So in a sense we need to be sharper and better. We need to have new skills to wade through all the information and analyse it. I really think technology has been very important in Asia in terms of giving us access in terms of giving us information.

The other thing thatâs been important for journalists working in Asia since the mid-1980s is that weâve seen a number of authoritarian governments fall in the Philippines, in South Korea, in Thailand, in Indonesia and in Taiwan. So we now have a much more open environment in which we can operate. So we had a region that was fairly uniformly affected by press control. Now we have a region which is varied. Thereâs strong press control in China and to a lesser extent in Malaysia and Singapore. Indonesia has closed down its Department of Information, ending decades of spying, harassing, following local and foreign journalists. So we have a very different operating environment, which I think is very useful for foreign correspondents.

But on an actual skill level, what do we need, what do we need to be able to go from covering a slice of Sydney news (so I do my cadetship in Sydney. I go down to the local courts every day and cover a court case. How do I then go to the Philippines and cover a nation or to Bangkok to cover a region. It is very difficult. It's different from sitting in a court case and saying ãhe saidä and ãshe saidä and thatâs the story. So I think you really need to seek an understanding of bilateral relations. What is important between Australia and the country youâre based in? What is important trade wise? What kind of contacts do the countries have? Then you really need to be able to zoom up and look at the regional picture.

I donât think you necessarily have to have a degree in political science or international relations. But it is a different way of looking at news and it is a conceptual jump from being good at writing on that small slice to being able to see the big picture. From a practical point of view, I really do think you need language skills and I say that having been posted to three countries with no language training myself, because I guess Australian journalism has always believed in jumping in the deep end and coping. I do think that is changing now. It's a hell of a job to learn a language and to work at the same time in a base country. You know, you really should learn the language first. My organisation hasnât really worked that out yet, but I hope they will soon.

Culture, yes, same thing. Go to a country and just look around, donât judge. The longer youâre there you absorb all these cultural skills that you didnât even know you had, until you come back to Australia and feel like youâre a foreigner, especially if youâve been in Asia for 13 or 14 years. Another practical issues is, how do you fulfil Western deadlines using high speed communication equipment in which you must file for Sydney at 7pm, which is 3 or 4pm in Jakarta in a system when you know the press conference will be an hour to an hour and a half late.

Unfortunately your editors will ask you to comply to Western deadlines, especially on a daily paper and sometimes you have to get used to filing ãholding storiesä, which is what you think will happen and by second edition it might have happened and by third edition it probably has happened. You just hope that youâre not too embarrassed the next day. I guess the most telling test in my entire career was when President Suharto announced that he was not going to step down, but that he would call new elections and sort of 2 minutes before the dealine in Australia we had to decide whether Suharto had played a really shrewd card and was going to be able to manage and cling onto power or whether he was going to fall.

About 10 seconds before the deadline I said ãOK, weâll go with showdown, its not going to workä and thank god we were right, because we splashed it right across the top ãShowdown·ä, they had Amien Rais under police surveillance, but we could have equally been wrong, we had to comply with the deadlines. I think it is really, really essential to understand the environment in which you are working.

But the journalism industry comes with journalism skills first and I think that Asia skills are an add-on. I think that it's still required that you demonstrate at the court or at the state parliament house or on police rounds that you can conceive of and clearly communicate the story in Australia. In a sense you have to prove yourself as a journalist before youâll ever get sent overseas, and that you have to add on those skills. So I think journalism is always going to be the starting point, it has to be.

I think since the mid-1980s Australiaâs foreign policy has really brought us far closer to Asia. I left school in 1979 as the last batch of high school Asia illiterates. The following year Indonesian was offered for the first time. Iâm presuming that many of you who are much younger than me have come through a system which isnât Asia illiterate. Perhaps the next generation of journalists who are coming through will understand the region a lot better than my generation and generations older than myself, just because youâre familiar with it. You would have done more than reload the fuel in Denpasar on the way to Europe.

You might have actually got off in Indonesia. I think that that will be very useful. It needs to be, because we now watch Asia as a real neighbouring country story. We watch Indonesia and the shifts and shuffles in Jakarta as closely as we used to watch Downing Street. So I think that in my time from 1986 until now that there has been a very big shift. Now, I was also asked to speak a little about what it is like to be a woman and a mother covering Asia and I guess there hasnât been many mothers with young children posted in developing countries. Funnily enough I sometimes found that in a sense it was an advantage, because motherhood has a fairly strong place in Asian societies.

I have of course, also put up with barbs from my colleagues including claims that I used to run away from riots to breastfeed, which is absolutely true by the way. If you have to breastfeed, you absolutely have to run away from the riot. I think journalism is about 50/50 male to female now and in a sense the foreign correspondents at the bar were the last great male bastion. There are plenty of women on the stools now, although arguably many of them do not have children and I think children, especially young children, I had young children in Indonesia, really poses some serious questions - When is the danger too much? When are you indulging yourself? When is the time to leave? My own children lived on a civil emergency system at school, they had overnight bags and they still role play games with their toys about riots and they had to suffer the death of a very close family friend in Timor.

Those are all the questions that a father would ask as well, so maybe I should just ask talk about parenting. Then you ask them for yourself too. What skills do you have to cope with violence that you would not have to see in Australia on a daily basis? What we saw in Timor, what we saw in Indonesia, the gunning down of students in 1992 in Thailand, the coups in the Philippines in the 1980s, the riots in Korea in 1987 and the killing of students in Burma in 1987. It just goes on and on and on. You face a world that you wouldnât have to face here and you have to think very very carefully what that would do to you and what that would do to your family. I just think that Timor is just so close in our memory. We all got personal death threats sent to our homes and of course one of my colleagues in Jakarta was killed. I think that that is a very important issue.

I guess Iâll just leave it with you on a lighter note with a story from Bangkok. Before I went to Asia there was a friend of mine who worked for ABC radio, I wonât say who he was, and heâd worked in Bangkok and he said ãLook Louise, its just too hot and Iâm just too fatä. They had to carry those great big, old, very heavy tape recorders and he said he couldnât get half way across Bangkok with out being dripping wet with sweat. He just couldnât do it. We did actually, when I was in Bangkok for 3 years, we did have a joke, because you were required to attend most public functions, outdoors in a city which is regularly 38 or 40 degrees, because its in a bowl, its one of the hottest cities in Asia.

If you were a man you had to wear a suit with a tie and if you were a woman you had to wear long sleaves, skirt and a jacket and we did actually have a sweat king award. There was an American-Polish journalist there who was about 6 foot 4 and he got the ultimate prize because he had a sweat ring through his coat jacket that got down to his pockets, so he was the champion. Anyway it was so hot over there. Thanks.

Peter Mares

Iâll start by saying a few words about technology as well. ABC journalists were always famous for their ability to dismantle telephone lines in any hotel anywhere around the world, because of course, we needed to patch our tape recorders into the telephone line to send voice clips back over the line. So you basically had to rip the telephone out of the wall and take a pair of alligator clips with you and clip them across the line so that you could send your story back down the line. Always travel with screw drivers and various other small tools.

Just to continue on the technology theme. Things have changed incredibly, as Louise indicated. When I was in Vietnam there was a very small bureau. There was me and then there were some local staff and that meant we didnât have a camera operator and when I arrived in Vietnam I didnât have any television experience. I came from a radio background and whenever I wanted to do a TV story I had to hire a crew. We had a discount deal with Reuters who were one floor below us and that was US $500 per day to hire their crew and do a story. The standard rate would be more like US$800-$1000 per day. Everytime I went back to Sydney I would outline an idea for a TV story and the internationalÊ editor would ask me how much will it cost and I would say US $500 per day and then thereâs overnight costs and insurance and he would say ãwell thatâs a nice story Peter, but I donât think it is that big a storyä.

So then when I came back to Australia briefly, I said to him ãwhy donât you give me one of those mini-digital video cameras and I can shoot the pictures myselfä and he asked me whether Iâd use a video camera before and I said I hadnât. So he suggested ãwhy donât you buy the video camera and then do some stories and if we use them weâll hire the camera from youä. This an interesting ABC story, but in fact it worked out quite well, because I was able to shoot the stories myself and I gained a whole new set of skills and I was able to do stories that I wouldnât have been able to do otherwise because of the budget constraints.

I was also able to do that because Vietnam was not a front line bureau like Jakarta where you would never have the time to do that sort of work and you would need a full time camera operator working with you. In Vietnam, partly because of Vietnam time and partly because of the political constraints there you could spend a bit more time on stories that were more feature based or personality based and so on, rather than the hard news of the day.

Let me tell you another story to illustrate a point about Asia Skills and being a journalist in Asia. When I first went to Vietnam, a few weeks after arriving in Hanoi, I went down to Ho Chi Minh City and I noticed that in the evenings there would be these young boys walking around the streets in raggedy clothing and theyâd have a piece of bamboo in one hand and a stick in the one and theyâd hit the bamboo and it made this fantastic resonant note that you could hear echoing down alley ways and down streets as the traffic died down in the evening. I thought it was like a little game they were playing to entertain themselves to pass the time.

Of course, my assistant who was highly amused about this soon set me straight. What they were really doing was selling noodles. They were basically street boys working for the local noodle vendor and they would go around and this was the call that they were selling noodles. Someone sitting in a shop doorway who couldnât leave their shop would call the boy over pay for the noodles and the boy would bring back the noodles and get a small tip. So that just shows how easy it is to misunderstand things and thatâs why I think language skills are very important.

I say that when the only language Iâm fluent in is German, which is not useful in Asia, unless you happen to meet Dr BJ Habbibie, the former President of Indonesia or the odd Vietnamese secret service agent who was trained in East Germany. But I did spend quite a lot of time learning both Indonesian and Vietnamese and although I didnât learn enough to work professionally, I did learn enough to know the extent of my own ignorance for a start and the limited language skills did open up a whole lot of insights, a whole lot of understandings.

For example, in Vietnamese thereâs a shifting pronoun, you donât refer to yourself as ãIä and someone else as ãyouä, you refer to yourself by referring to your status in relation to the other person. So if I was speaking to someone who is old enough to be my grand father, I refer to myself as ãchildä and to that other person as ãgrand fatherä. Thatâs the standard thing. It provides you with a whole lot of information about status, the importance of age, respect, all sorts of things about politenesses and that gives you an insight.

One of the things my long-suffering assistant would chastise me for when I went into interviews was, that I didnât spend enough time just chatting before I started asking serious questions. She (the assistant) kept stressing to me the importance of asking about family and that sort of thing. That wasnât just about smoothing things over, it was about allowing someone else to work out who you were and what your status was and those sorts of things.

Language skills are not always taken very seriously by Australian media organisations, I have to say. When I first applied for an overseas position in Tokyo with the ABC, a position for which I was unsuccessful, one of the interviewers asked me how important I thought it would be to be able to speak Japanese. Being an honest sort of person, I said, if youâve got a candidate who speaks Japanese you should give the job to them and not me, because I think it will make a huge difference.

One of the panel members, a senior former foreign correspondent said that ãyou can be an idiot in seven languagesä. Now technically thatâs true, but it indicates to me a lack of regard for the role of language skills and the kind of advantages that could give to a journalist working in the region. I think this has shifted. A couple of years ago when the ABC advertised internally for a new Jakarta correspondent, it was made clear and this was the first time this had happened to my knowledge, that the successful applicant would have three months intensive language training before starting reporting.

Obviously that is not enough to get fluency, but Indonesian is a fairly easy language and it would open some understandings. Equally the internal memo that announced the appointment of current correspondent, Mark Bowling, emphasised the point that Mark already had significant Indonesian language skills. The ABCâs correspondent in Beijing, Jane Hutcheon is fluent in Mandarin, a former New Delhi correspondent, Edmund Roy is fluent in several Indian languages, The Australianâs former Beijing correspondent, Richard McGregor, who is a former colleague of mine, worked very hard to learn Mandarin.

He went to Taipei and worked for an English language radio station there and financed his own language studies there, that meant a risk, that meant quitting or taking leave from the ABC and taking a salary cut and a break from his career. We canât all hope to be fluent and certainly not in all of the languages of the region, particularly now as many media jobs now are regionally based. The ABCâs bureau in Bangkok actually covers all of South East Asia accept for Indonesia, so all of the 9 ASEAN countries apart from Indonesia.

So obviously you are in Kuala Lumpur one day and Singapore the next. You canât expect to master all of those languages. I have four recommendations for you if you are wanting to build up knowledge of Asia and they are: read, read, read and listen. Read literature and translation, thereâs no better introduction of Indonesia than the novel of Pramoedeya Ananta Toer and so forth. Read books of history and political analysis. I find myself that cultural explanations are often done.

So called ãAsian valuesä where you get a book about Singapore or about Indonesian and I cringe when I hear a sentence which starts ãThe Balinese are·..ä because that is inevitably leading to some crass generalisation. To me its equally important if not more important to understand power structures, to identify competing interests, to understand the historical forces which have shaped society, the structure of an economy and so on. The cultural side of things can be over done. So read, read, read, journals like the Far East Economic Review, Art and the Asia-Pacific and listen, well thatâs obvious, listen to Asia Pacific which is on a 8am Monday to Saturday.

Incidentally it wasnât just my idea to make the program a daily program, it was something that Radio Australia was keen to do, because Radio Australia coming off a series of cuts was keen to create a new daily Asian current affairs program for the international service as well as to broadcast nationally Radio National. I would say that the serious end of Australian media has become or is becoming interested in Asia and the reporting of the region has become more sophisticated and there is much greater volume.

For example, when I began broadcasting for the ABC in 1987, there were no Australian correspondents based in Indonesia in the wake of the Jenkins Affair, who was Louiseâs colleague, who compared in an article Suhartoâs family to that of Marcosâ and created an international incident in the process. Now we have the Australian Associated Press, the ABC, the Australian Financial Review, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, I think there are probably more now that that. There are freelancers working out of Jakarta, for example one who files to our program and we had correspondents in East Timor as well as that.

Over the past 12 years the ABCs network of Bureaus has waxed and waned, its peak was Jakarta, Singapore, New Delhi, Tokyo, Beijing and Hanoi and at various times there were also offices in Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. The ABC was second only to the Japanese Broadcaster NHK in terms of its regional spread. Sadly that is no longer the case, budget cuts have forced the closure of both Singapore and Hanoi. Equally now, ambitious journalists no longer set their sights on a stint in London or Washington, many are equally keen to go to Hong Kong, Tokyo or Jakarta.

But if you are considering a career in the Australian media and you want to combine that with an interest in Asia then you must be realistic about the limited opportunities on offer. Most material that you see broadcast or on TV or you read in the papers doesnât come from correspondents based overseas, it comes from agencies and wire services, not from a dedicated correspondent. A while ago I did an estimate of foreign correspondents and youâve probably only got 30 or 40 jobs for correspondents and then thereâs associated jobs for camera operators and so on. Equally, most postings only last for 3 or maybe up to 5 years, so what happens when you come back to Australia? The likelihood is that you come back and end up working in some completely unrelated field, not necessarily exploiting those Asia skills.

For example, Tony Melville was a former ABC correspondent in South East Asia and he ended up as a media officer for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Jordan Taylor came back from South East Asia to be a science and medical reporter and then went on to be an executive producer for another current affairs program and so on. What Iâm saying is that if you want to keep your focus on current affairs in the region or on a particular country, then you will need to built your own career path. I struggled with this to a certain extent on my return from Vietnam, luckily I was able to find this program ãAsia Pacificä which allowed me to keep that focus, Louise is probably able to do that on the foreign desk.

Other people have moved sideway to work for a different organisation to stay in the region. The key point I want to finish on is the same as Louiseâs really and that is to succeed working in the media and in Asia youâll not only need good Asia Skills, but you will also need journalist skills. You must be able to write well, to write fast and to write accurately. You need to be able to render complex issues into understandable, concise, accessible and engaging copy. You need to have good presentation skills for Radio and Television.

In other words, journalist skills are going to count for more than Asia skills in terms of getting you into the media and providing a platform for where you want to go. You need to be able to adapt your Asia Skills to fit the medium of media you are working in. So after my first application for an overseas posting was knocked back, because I came from the Radio National side of the ABC. There are a few bureaucratic divisions in the ABC including News and Current Affairs and then places like Radio National. I didnât have the daily reporting experience and fair enough.

The view was, how could the executive producer of AM, that they sent me to Jakarta Iâd do a good job, so I was advised to get that experience in Australia and then apply again which is what I did. Those would be my main points. If you want to get yourself into the media, you have to get yourself published and there are all sorts of ways to do that. Basically it means reading and writing, reading and writing. Thank you.

Asialink, The University of Melbourne

Media

Mobilising Asia Skills Conference, March, 2000