New Asian citizen journalism website set to launch

A new pan-Asian citizen journalism website that claims to have found a sustainable web publishing model is launching on Monday.

Asian Correspondent has managed to attract some of the region’s top online scribes thanks to its rare pledge to pay “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”.

(Those signed up include blogger-turned-MP Jeff Ooi and former editor Ahirudin Attan (aka Rocky’s Bru) from Malaysia, Danny Arao and Tonyo Cruz from the Philippines and Atanu Dey and Sriram Vadlamani from India.)

The new site, which is going live on Monday and will launch officially in November, will combine content from 50 socio-political and lifestyle bloggers across Asia with syndicated news and pictures and Associated Press, the American newswire.

I was initially rather skeptical when I found out that the Asian Correspondent was founded by an Australian business-to-business media executive based in Bristol, in the west of England.

But when I spoke to 35-year-old James Craven, who was formerly chief executive of a business publisher called GDS International, it was clear that he had the determination and business nous to give it a good go.

“The challenge is to monetise content online,” he said. “Rupert Murdoch thinks you can sell it and Arianna Huffington thinks she can rely on the charity of the blogosphere but I don’t think either approach will work.”

“I’ve got a unique business model in the blogosphere – paying all our writers a monthly fee based on the quality of their content, its appropriateness to the site and the number of followers they have.”

At present, even Asia’s most successful bloggers can only earn peanuts from placing Google adverts on their sites – an approach that Craven described as “highway robbery”.

“There’s a huge disparity between the traffic a blogger can generate and their ability to monetise that traffic,” he explained. “In the business-to-business publishing world, 30,000-40,000 readers is a strong audience. But in the fragmented world of blogging, single authors are receiving 40,000-50,000 viewers a month and are only getting $100-$200 a month.”

While he accepted that blogging for Asian Correspondent will still be just a “part-time income”, he said that his bloggers can expect to earn between $2,500 and $10,000 a year, which is 5-15 times what Google is paying them.

But how will Craven make any money?

It’s simple, he claimed. He’ll bypass Google and sell online advertising space to companies and media agencies himself.

Other pan-Asian news websites such as Asia Sentinel (which I contribute to) and Asia Times Online, which have tried to replace the gap left by the closure of print publications such as the Far Eastern Economic Review and Asiaweek, have struggled more with the commercial than the journalistic side of the business.

So perhaps this is where Craven’s business background will come in useful. He said that he has signed up “an experienced sales team” based in the New York office of Hybrid News, his UK registered company.

“Our audience will be defined by the content we run,” he added. “We’re targeting a demographic of hard-working Asian people looking for progressive viewpoints from this progressive newspaper.”

He is hoping to break even by the middle of next year but was well aware that targets don’t mean much in a start-up business.

Craven has put in £250,000 of his own to cash and has some funding in place from HSBC. His operation seems pretty professional – he has recruited 12 full-time staff and is relying on a team of almost 60 freelance writers, programmers and web developers.

With most traditional newspaper business models failing dismally, a number of people have suggested setting up a professional news website where the content is produced by low-budget bloggers and citizen journalists rather than expensive journalists.

Asian Correspondent seems to be the first such initiative in Asia. As with any new publication – particularly a new online publication – it will be very difficult to attract decent first-time advertisers without offering them massive discounts.

But I wish Craven and his team all the best. It’s only by trying out new approaches such as this that a solution to the seemingly inexorable demise of proper reporting in Asia and elsewhere will be found.

P.S. For anyone who's read this far, an 'alpha' version of the site is currently visible here. For the view of a Thai blogger who turned down Craven's advances, see here.

More on loan sharks in Singapore

I've got a more in-depth story on the loan shark problem in Singapore in the Asia Sentinel (extract below), which looks at why Singaporeans are turning to illegal money-lenders and what can be done to fight the surging intimidation and violence.

When the Singapore police nailed four suspected members of a loan-sharking syndicate on July 21, they seized the usual paraphernalia: mobile phones and prepaid SIM cards and the time-honored tools of intimidation such as paint to be splashed on the doors of bad debtors and superglue to lock them inside their apartments.

But while loan sharks – or Ah Longs as they are known – have long been a ubiquitous presence on Singapore's sprawling public housing estates, this gang is one of a growing number taking bully-boy tactics to the next level.

One of the members, according to the police, had been sending bullets to borrowers in an attempt to scare them into paying up. The syndicate, which police said was responsible for more than 600 harassment cases, were said to have also been terrorizing the wider community by starting fires outside the apartments of bad debtors.

Cynthia Phua, an MP from the ruling People's Action Party, told local media in a recent interview that the level of harassment in her constituency in eastern Singapore has surged. "It is also more violent," she said. "We are seeing things we did not see before, like petrol bombs and innocent neighbors being harassed."

In a city-state that proudly boasts one of the lowest crime rates in Asia, such violence was once rare. But, worryingly for the government and the vast majority of the population who live in the public housing estates, it is becoming increasingly widespread as the economic crisis forces more people to turn to loan sharks.

How transcendental meditation can solve Afghan violence

On the eve of the Afghan elections, violence has predictably erupted in Kabul.

The Afghan government has asked local and foreign journalists not to report on the violence during election day so as not to put voters off casting their ballots.

But there appears to be a much more effective way to solve the problem. All you need is 580 people (the square root of 1% of the population) thinking positive thoughts and practicing transcendental meditation and all the violence in Afghanistan can be beaten.

I'm serious - or at least the oddballs from the Center for Advanced Military Science at the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, which is part of the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, are.

John Berthelsen has the full story over at the Asia Sentinel (which I write for).

You could not make this up.