Prof Choi Young Jae of South Korea's Hallym University, who conducted the research on nine Asian news agencies over a 10-day period last July, said most of the news about Asia, relayed by news agencies, now came from fellow Asian counterparts.
"Even North American and European news stories are mostly coming from Asian news agencies. In other words, Asian news agencies produce Asian, American and European news stories on their own," he told the Organisation of Asia Pacific News Agencies (OANA) Summit Congress in Seoul.
The research project was to determine the degree and how the news agencies which included Bernama, the Malaysian national news agency, report about Asia.
The other agencies were South Korea's Yonhap, host of the four-day summit here, Xinhua (China), Kyodo (Japan), Philippines News Agency (PNA), Press Trust of India (PTI), Thai News Agency (TNA), Antara of Indonesia and Vietnam News Agency (VNA).
Choi said another important finding of the study was that Asian news agencies tended to portray Asia not so negatively but fairly, in keeping with their neutral stands.
"Asian news agencies (now) have their own voices in covering Asia and the world, competing with their Western counterparts," said Choi, who is also a board member of South Korea's News Agency Promotion Foundation.
Having achieved success in the text news services, he said the summit could be a springboard for the 40-member OANA to cooperate in multi-media contents.
He noted that the agencies were moving into multi-media platform by having television news, internet services and smart phones television applications.
