Weera Suwannachote

With a television in virtually every Thai home, the mainstream media can play an important role in raising the voice of underrepresented groups and bringing social issues into public discussion. Weera Suwannachot is now putting this powerful tool in the hands of youth by creating a school-based pool of young news reporters trained and linked to produce professional segments on youth issues for broadcast on regional and national television networks.

Although youth constitute one of the major consumers of mainstream media in Thailand, youth-driven television–television by, for, and about youth–has been largely absent. Through his Thai Youth News Center (TYNC), Weera is filling this gap. Working in partnership with UNICEF, the National Youth Bureau, and the Ministry of Education, the TYNC helps establish local volunteer-run youth news clubs in high schools selected to represent the economic, social, geographic, and ethnic diversity of the country. Weera and his staff then train youth participants to independently produce their own professional-standard, TV youth news–stories about how events affect the lives and rights of children in their community–allowing them to control all aspects of the news production process, from conceiving and researching the story to actually filming the interviews. If it were limited only to providing TV production skills, the TYNC would still fulfill important youth development objectives: helping youth to acquire vocational and other important life skills (like teambuilding, confidence, and the ability to listen and respect the views of others) and to reflect critically on society. But, by partnering with the Mass Media and Communications Authority of Thailand, Weera obtained noncommercial airtime on national television to broadcast these youth reports weekly. By bringing the voices of these youth to the mainstream, Weera is creating Thailand's first quality, noncommercial, educational programming for children by children and stimulating ongoing dialogue about youth issues among his youth and adult audiences.
With the TYNC already working with its established partners to increase both the number of student reporters and the television channels through which their work is shown, Weera is shifting his focus to expanding the TYNC programmatically and internationally. Building off the same base of youth reporters, Weera is branching out into different media (the Internet, radio, and print) to provide additional distribution channels for youth news content. In addition, he is identifying and securing the professional networks, allies, and students necessary to spread youth-driven television throughout the region, beginning in neighboring countries.

The creation of national, non-commercial, youth-driven media has until recently been stymied by a number of logistical, economic, social, and political hurdles. Because Thailand's highly centralized education system traditionally promoted conformity rather than innovation in both its curriculum and its extracurricular activities, previous attempts to put media in the hands of youth focused on the nonprofit sector, a sector whose high turnover of both adult advisers and student participants prevented their programs from achieving the stability and continuity necessary to reach the national scale. Given the high cost of commercial airtime, such grassroots efforts also had limited access to the media. As a result, their impact–both in terms of number of participants and audience–was limited.

Moreover, youth productions historically have not been considered acceptable–either because the government's fear of student protesters led it to deem all youth-produced content politically subversive, or because such productions rarely reached the professional standards required for broadcast on mainstream stations. Media produced by adults for children has traditionally satisfied the need for quality, educational programming for youth. Commercial television, though highly entertaining, is focused on selling products and is dominated by foreign influences; as such it does little to fulfill the potential of the mainstream media as an educational tool for youth. For example, there has been little systematic attempt to utilize television to develop an appreciation of Thailand's own ethnic diversity or of the cultures of other countries in the region.

Now, Thailand's new constitution–and the more civil society-friendly atmosphere it is enabling–has created an opportunity to overcome these obstacles. Education reform has opened the school system and its curriculum to more innovation and student-centered learning, while providing career incentives for teachers to employ such approaches. Constitutionally required restructuring of the media is creating increased interest and a greater possibility for noncommercial television and citizen access to the mainstream channels. In the face of the growing dominance of commercial, globalized media, parents are also expressing the desire to see more culturally appropriate, educational, and noncommercial television for youth.

Working with national and international partners, Weera is joining the idea of youth-driven mainstream media to an organizational structure at the national level–beginning with television, the medium most influential with his young target audience. To this end Weera works to create a pool of national youth news reporters and to gain access to the airwaves to distribute their work widely.

Taking advantage of recent education reform that allows for greater curricular freedom in schools, Weera is gaining the stability and continuity typically lacking in the grassroots sector by instituting his youth reporters in Thailand's high schools. Using existing child and youth development networks, including those of UNICEF, the National Youth Bureau, and the National Council for Child and Youth Development (a prominent Thai nonprofit), Weera identifies secondary schools willing to support the project and helps students and teachers establish their own independent, local Youth News Center consisting of approximately 20 students and two teacher-advisers. These youth news clubs are run entirely by volunteers. While being on television is an obvious draw for students, teachers see their participation as professional development, because recent education reform has made support of youth activities a significant factor in career advancement.

As Weera seeks to increase understanding of youth issues, content for the news reports is not only determined by the youth–it is also about them. Students cover topics ranging from provincial governors' policies to the environment through the lens of impact on the lives of children and youth. For example, youth reporters would not investigate murders, but they might explore how violence affects children in their community. In this way, youth reports can avoid being seen as a political tool manipulated by one or another party. By including subtitles on news stories made by students who speak different languages or regional dialects, the TYNC also guarantees that the voice of its reporters can be heard by all.

To ensure that youth news reporters are representative of youth around the country, schools are selected to represent Thailand's geographic, socioeconomic, and ethnic diversity. The 150 schools now participating–with approximately 3,000 youth participants–are located in all four major regions of the country with a roughly equal distribution of urban and rural schools and proportional representation of schools from minority communities. The Ministry of Education agreed in 2002 to integrate the project into the national curriculum and to undertake responsibility for its spread to new schools, entering into a formal agreement with UNICEF to jointly expand the program to 20 new high schools each year over the next five years.

Although Weera secured in 2000, free of charge, a weekly half-hour time slot on the national government channel, he realizes that a single program cannot provide sufficient airtime to broadcast the work of a growing number of youth reporters. For this reason, Weera is working to expand TV outlets. He is negotiating with a private, national television channel for a free slot for a youth news program, in addition to a hoped-for "youth news" segment in all of their daily news broadcasts.

As Weera's ultimate goal is to make the voice of youth heard in all media, not just television, the TYNC is currently expanding into the Internet, radio, and print. Using the same base of reporters and a similar training methodology, TYNC is phasing in these new distribution channels based on the logistical difficulty and relevance to his target youth audience. With support of the National Youth Bureau's Media for Children Fund, the TYNC is developing the Web site thaiyouthnews.com to rebroadcast regional news and to serve as an information center for more in-depth coverage of issues. By the end of 2003, Weera anticipates launching a youth news radio program.

Once the Thailand program is well established, Weera will focus on the more challenging, longer-term task of replicating his idea of youth driven media regionally. As he is doing in Thailand, Weera plans to leverage the resources of existing organizations to spread his idea. However, as the media in many Southeast Asian countries are not given as wide a berth as they are in Thailand, Weera proposes to start small in terms of content. By focusing on culturally attractive topics, like national heritage, youth reporters in these countries will be able to report on topics in their own countries, and they will also be featured in Thailand to educate Thai youth about neighboring cultures.

Weera grew up in northeastern Thailand, the second of three children. As a leader in his high school student union, Weera created a program that linked his well-off classmates with disadvantaged children in outlying rural areas, providing the youngsters with much-needed donated supplies and enriching nonacademic activities and promoting among the students a better understanding of village life. Because poor students like him could not afford the supplementary study materials and the tutoring other students used to pass university entrance exams, Weera convinced his high school principal to purchase the necessary books so he could create a library, thereby allowing students to borrow what they could not buy.

In 1992 Weera enrolled in Mahidol University where he became increasingly involved in using media–particularly theater–as a tool for spreading public health messages. For his undergraduate thesis, Weera designed a theater production with village youth to convey the importance of boiling drinking water, a strategy that proved far more effective in communicating the idea in an understandable manner and integrating its practice into daily life than earlier attempts by public health officials. With this experience, Weera undertook a variety of positions in the media after graduating, serving as a scriptwriter, magazine columnist, event organizer, and TV producer–before eventually joining a well-known media company. With this corporation Weera produced a national television show, Jiew Jeaw Jao Lok, featuring child reporters. Although the program became popular with both kids and adults under his leadership, Weera grew frustrated because the show was not truly by and for youth. Commercial constraints forced him to promote products that he knew were not healthy for the audience, and the show did not truly represent children–although they appeared on camera–because he still controlled the production, content, and message.

Wanting to put children in charge, Weera left the television show in 1999 and approached UNICEF to initiate in Thailand a youth-run media program under the auspices of UNICEF's annual International Children's Day of Broadcasting. With initial access to 24 schools facilitated through UNICEF, Weera trained his first group of youth news reporters whose work was shown nationally on Children's Broadcasting Day. Building on the success of the one-day event, Weera created a pilot model to create reports and broadcasts year-round.