Although Western media dominate the world's news industry, Asia-based and Asian reporters manage to collaborate with these channels to deliver globally recognized works. The co-head for the Asia-Pacific region of Bloomberg News attributed this good reporting to the understanding of local contexts, while a former Chinese digital producer at CNN highlighted her elimination of biased and selective viewpoints.
From left to right: Bloomberg News's senior executive editor Madeleine Lim; Former CNN's Chinese digital producer Shen Lu; DealStreetAsia's senior writer Ngoc Nguyen.
According to the London-based web analytics service provider SimilarWeb, the ten biggest news websites in the world in April 2020 called Latin America's Globo, the U.S.'s CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, Yahoo News, and the U.K.'s BBC, The Guardian, and Daily Mail.
"When you tell the story for a global audience, you often run the risk of superimposing your framework, mostly the Western framework, onto the Asian background,” said Madeleine Lim, Bloomberg News's senior executive editor and co-head for the Asia-Pacific region, who manages 24 bureaus and 600 editorial staff across the region.
"That can sometimes lead to blind spots that can be quite detrimental to the quality of reporting," she stated.
Lim cited a typical example of Tofu, which is a traditional food of Chinese origin. Despite being a household dish in Asia, Tofu was once negatively described as a bland and tasteless food product in an article written by a U.S. reporter. This called for international media to be more open to the local and leverage the "ability to bridge the gap to another culture."
"But that doesn't mean that you do not speak truth to power. That doesn't mean that you're self-censored," Lim asserted.
Former CNN's Chinese digital producer Shen Lu, an award-winning international journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, POLITICO Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, said that as a journalist covers China in the U.S., she sometimes had to report on topics that can be considered sensitive in China.
"It's a calculation that I have to do every day," Lu admitted. "But when I really want to do it, I do it," she said, adding that she would keep a very low profile at China in the meantime.
However, Lu asserted that she also had to overcome the biased Western perspective on her reporting, in which she wanted to clear up the fundamental misunderstandings about her country.
"If you don't denounce the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] or the Chinese government directly, then there are assumptions at some level that you are a CCP apologist or a 'panda hugger,'" stated Lu.
She noted that it is more important to focus on facts and always talk to more people than needed for stories. "You get multiple perspectives. You're not just citing one single voice."
Ngoc Nguyen, a senior Vietnamese writer at Singapore-based leading publisher of investment news DealStreetAsia, said that she took at least thirty minutes a day to read other international reporters' articles to overview the current context, as well as discuss with her senior editor about other appropriate sources for her upcoming stories.
"When I write about Vietnam, I often refer to its regional peers or recent similar events, which could highlight the differences of the case and give readers broader and deeper understandings," she said.
The Bloomberg News senior editor backed this practice as she noted that Bloomberg News audiences, who are mostly global investors looking for potential deals around the world, want to know and understand how things are working locally.
Meanwhile, Lim also highly valued the need for reporters to have wider perspectives. She drew an example of reporters who want to cover technology in the region.
"The tech industry in Asia is influenced. It's a global industry," Lim said. "That would be my one thing about not narrowing yourself down to something and something plus Asia."