New media links 'become a driving force' for region

The power of the pen is rewriting Asia's future with greater-than-ever dynamism in an age where the script of the world's story is increasingly composed of ones and zeros, according to the executive director of the Asia News Network.

Digital technology is among the most international of languages. It speaks to all of us in a way no other communicative form has, Pana Janviroj told China Daily on Saturday.

Consequently, new-media collaboration has become one of the driving forces of the ANN, he said.

Janviroj was in Beijing with representatives of the ANN's 21 members, including China Daily, for the organization's annual meeting that ends on Tuesday.

It will launch a new website and mobile platform during the event.

"It's an upgrade in a way that perhaps tries to answer the challenges … of the way that we tell stories," Janviroj said.

"The issue for us is to catch on with the mobile platforms, and perhaps develop for the social media platforms that will be answerable to readers not only in Asia but around the world."

Video ranks among future focuses, and demand outpaces output.

Technological advances are not only transforming how end products are consumed but how the inspiration for them is produced, beginning at the brainstorming stage.

"But through technology, we talk to one another almost every other day," Janviroj said.

Survival of the fittest hones media adaptation to technology's evolution.

It is a DNA not only coded in ones and zeros but also written through human interaction. Janviroj also believes this year could be a "watershed".

"If you check the development and the number of stories that the member papers use now — increasingly in print and many more on the website or mobiles — there's more demand for the number of news stories with different angles, and the perhaps greater interdependence among the Asian countries," he said.

"This is what we see. We also come to support one another — whether it's a typhoon in the Philippines or an earthquake in Nepal.

"You have to remember we stretch from Japan to Pakistan. From the north, it's China right down to Indonesia," Janviroj said.

As a result, the pluralistic variety of events happening in Asia is "quite considerable".

The organization is considering taking on new members to expand its "depth and breadth".

"The idea of the Asia News Network is not only to collaborate among ourselves," Janviroj said. "We also unanimously support things that Asia can do together."

This is through a platform for discourse that ultimately deffuses political tensions, he said.

"In our professionalism, in our journalism, I think none of us add fuel to the fire," he said. "We have to report correctly … But wherever we can, we engage in dialogue."