News Fit to Print — in Modern-Day Myanmar - UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

By Elise Anderson

In today’s digital age, with mobile devices and online streaming services ascendant, print is considered a dinosaur.

But when Sylvia Saw McKaige (’11) surveyed the Southeast Asian media landscape, she decided to take an alternative, back-to-the-future tack with a country that only recently came online. The longtime media professional and UCLA Anderson graduate recently launched Frontier Myanmar, an English-language print magazine published weekly in Myanmar.

“I felt that good solid journalism was missing in the market,” she says. “You know, that feeling when you watch a news program or read an article and you think, ‘Wow, that’s good reporting.’”

McKaige’s background, both personal and professional, prepared her to make this leap of faith in a country not known for press freedom. She was born and raised in Singapore. Her father is Burmese and her mother is Chinese. She gained journalism experience working as a business reporter at the Bangkok Post newspaper in Thailand and as a television producer at CNBC Asia, and later headed the guest assignment desk as part of the senior editorial team involved with the development of strategy for programming.

In 2009, McKaige decided to enhance her business credentials. As she juggled marriage, motherhood (she and her husband have two teenaged children) and her full-time workload at CNBC Asia, she also navigated the UCLA – NUS Executive Global Executive MBA program, developed jointly by UCLA Anderson School of Management and the National University of Singapore Business School.

The GEMBA program allowed her “to get the strategic thinking and key elements that have to come together for any business,” she says. “You get enough knowledge to know what’s important. If I didn’t go to business school, I would have been at a disadvantage in starting my own business.”

After graduation, McKaige moved to the commercial side of the media industry, heading the in-house creative solutions and strategic content team for the CNBC network in the Asia-Pacific region, managing the production of sponsored programming, commercial content and event partnerships. She worked with corporate clients to produce branded content that combined her storytelling skills with the business and marketing knowledge she learned at UCLA Anderson.

She left CNBC in 2012 to form Singapore-based Salween Group, a content marketing agency serving regional companies looking to develop their brands in Asia and around the world.

McKaige also began to visit nearby Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). The timing was propitious: Myanmar had been ruled for five decades by a military dictatorship, with no press freedom. Now, in 2015, the country was finally, agonizingly, preparing to transition to a democracy.

That summer, McKaige partnered with Sonny Swe, an experienced media veteran in Myanmar, and hired a small editorial staff and advertising team. They launched the first issue of Frontier Myanmar in July 2015, in time to cover the November election and help build the reputation of Frontier Myanmar.

Starting a news magazine from scratch is not for the faint-hearted, McKaige admits, and Frontier Myanmar’s readership has grown slowly. They now have 250,000 readers monthly, on both print and digital platforms. The print advertising rate ranges from $750 to $1,500 per page, well below the regional average, but a premium in Myanmar; many advertisers are international companies “looking at building their presence in Myanmar,” McKaige says, including Samsung, Huawei, Heineken and Visa, as well as local Myanmar brands in the airlines, real estate, technology, hospitality and banking sectors.

“One of our biggest challenges is an industry-wide one: finding regular and sustainable advertising and subscription revenue in an environment where print, broadcast and online media compete for the same advertising dollar,” she says. “It requires us to be creative and to tweak our models so that we offer the most compelling case to advertisers, and to continuously provide journalism so strong that people are willing to pay for it and advertisers are willing to align their brands with us.”

The politics of Myanmar continue to loom large for McKaige’s staff, and she admits that the magazine’s editorial team must tread carefully at times. “There is pressure on us to be accountable and responsible about how we report and the way we write stories,” she says. “There is always that fear that the type of stories we write or the angle that we go for may ruffle some feathers, whether it’s the government or an individual. So, on a daily basis, we are very vigilant and careful on the editorial side. That pushes everyone to up their game.”

That said, the magazine has not shied away from controversial topics. Frontier Myanmar examined the practices and activities of the Myanmar International Cooperation Agency (MICA) a shadowy, semi-government enterprise. One investigative article in the series involved two months of research, interviews with government sources and information gleaned from Myanmar-language documents that had not been previously reported in English.

“Frontier Myanmar’s investigation into MICA drew an unprecedented level of scrutiny to a government agency that had operated almost in secret for several years, and helped to put the issue on the agenda of lawmakers in the national parliament,” says McKaige.

Meanwhile, McKaige has not ignored the 24/7 demands faced by media companies in the internet era. A digital edition of the magazine is available online in both English and the Myanmar language, and consumers can access content via an app. The company is also diversifying into broadcast by using modern technologies that are not tied to the pace of media reform. While the airwaves remain regulated, internet-based services, such as OTT (over-the-top) distribution, are the focus of the company’s efforts.

The forecast for print media globally may be grim, but McKaige is bullish on the future of Frontier Myanmar in her corner of the world. “The goal is to grow this company into a multimedia group that produces solid content that will entertain and inform the people of Myanmar and those around the world who are interested,” she says. “I’m committed to this country.”