And there the newspaper stayed for a good two decades until disaster struck. This office was in the middle of nowhere, in an outer suburb called Bang Na - the very same suburb that is today a traffic-clogged, jam-packed eastern district that feels inner-city.īack in 1990 it was a semi-rural area with herds of buffalo wandering down Bang Na-Trat Highway.
How times have changed that same building is now the 107th tallest building in the country. The Nation Group constructed two buildings, one of which, for a brief time before Baiyoke Tower went up, was the tallest building in Thailand. Soon after we moved out to the boondocks. The year was 1990 and The Nation was operating out of a rundown complex on Kluai Nam Thai in inner city Bangkok, not that far from where the Bangkok Post offices are now situated. My first reporting job in Thailand was at The Nation. The Nation was just a little more vocal about it.) (It has to be quickly added that the Bangkok Post, too, has always been a champion of democracy. For the next few decades it was a champion of democracy, standing up to despots, juntas, the elite and anybody else who eschewed democracy. Just four months later it reported on Thanom Kittikachorn’s military overthrow of the government, and two years later the student uprising against Thanom. The Nation began publication on July 1, 1971. The Nation would be Thailand’s only Thai-owned English newspaper. The Nation was created by media icon Suthichai Yoon who, almost half a century ago, expressed concern that the Bangkok Post’s only competitor, Bangkok World, had been swallowed up, leaving the English media in Thailand as a foreign monopoly. Her friends looked at her either as a champion for human rights - or a loudmouth. That’s because she was out on the streets in baggy trousers and flip-flops attending the latest protest, holding placards and shouting for justice.
While the Bangkok Post was seated in the living room, pince-nez perched on nose, reading the latest Dickens instalment, The Nation was nowhere to be seen. Having been around a little longer, she cast a reproachful eye upon her upstart younger sister. The Bangkok Post was the more staid of the two. They were two newspapers with two very different personalities. Such was the relationship between the Bangkok Post and The Nation, Thailand’s two major English language newspapers who fought relentlessly for the niche but influential market of English readers for nearly 50 years. It is a rule of competitive businesses not to recognise the competitor, pretending it does not exist - a rule that is broken, naturally, when something terrible happens to the competitor.
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