Media Landscape/Main Channels

• Newspapers (both print and online)
  
• Radio (local and some from US)
• Magazines (local, regional & international)
• Television (mostly local)
  

Traditional Media

AMSOR report

• The government has provided licenses to 122 national newspapers, 19 bulletins and 41 magazines, plus 45 licenses to 45 foreign NGO newspapers, magazines and bulletines. There is one local news agency and 14 foreign news agencies. There is print media in English, French and Chinese.
• There are only two publicly owned and 13 private radio stations. The strongest radio transmitter is 150-200kw. It can be heard in all provinces. There are 127 radio journalists. No law governs radio broadcasting, but the press law is applicable.
• The role of mass media in Cambodia has often been to help business and politicians. Local journalists sometimes accept bribes from politicians, thus losing their credibility.

Reporters Without Borders: Cambodia- Annual Report 2008
Political corruption in Cambodia's media (print and television) landscape:

• 'Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been in power since 1985, can count on the support of the majority of the broadcast media. Only one radio station is critical of him and the highly-politicised written press struggles to maintain its role of challenging authority'.
• Journalists face ‘harassment and death threats’, ‘judicial steps’ against what are determined as 'infringement(s)', ‘arrests’, and one had his ‘house set on fire’.
• Cambodia boasts 11 TV stations but not one of them is genuinely independent.
  

Cambodia's Battling Broadcasters - A CPJ Special Report by Shawn W. Crispin
History of Cambodia’s media landscape is a bloody one:

• ‘Journalists have often been caught in the crossfire of Cambodia’s violent political history. Reporters were rounded up and slaughtered during the Khmer Rouge’s notorious reign of terror from 1975 to 1979 and were frequently attacked in the more than decade-long civil war that followed the December 1978 invasion by Vietnam, which ousted the radical Maoist regime and installed Hun Sen as prime minister.’

The article also espouses the inefficiency of the 1993 (updated in 1995) Press Law and the corruption of the press that is still very existent today.

European Journalism Centre
Reported: Recent attacks on March 2, 2009
22 attacks conducted against journalists in Cambodia

New Media

Digital Media

The Cambodian Blogosphere

Key milestones:

• The NiDa project- An initiative by the Korean government to provide infrastructure & training so that Cambodia can enjoy better internet access
• By end 2004, there were about 10 bloggers in the Cambodian blogosphere. By 2009, there is a core group of 100 bloggers (or cloggers, as their community is affectionately known)
• Kalyan Keo (http://kalyankeo.blogspot.com/), one of the first female bloggers in Cambodia, was actually introduced to blogging by an SMU student while on her school exchange to SMU!
• After interacting as an online community for 2 years, the cloggers held the first Personal Information Technology Workshop (pitw.wordpress.com) for university students in 2006. The workshop was to expose them to the wonders of internet access, and also train them to be proficient in using the tools, particularly blogging. This spurred on many other workshops.
  
• The highly successful Cambodian Bloggers Summit (cloggerssummit.wordpress.com) was in August 2007 at Pannasastra University. It was mainly a time for knowledge exchange and networking, gathering over 200+ bloggers, tech-savvy individuals and people from the media.
• The first BarCamp (http://barcampphnompenh.org/) was held in September 2008. It functioned very much like an open forum, where participants gathered to share opinions and discuss various new technologies and tools.
  

Digital Media and development: The challenges in Southeast Asia by Judith Clarke
Community radio became legal in Cambodia in 2002 after lobbying by media activists persuaded the government to include it in the broadcasting law passed that year. RFA broadcasts openly via Beehive FM 105, a Phnom Penh station that is critical of the government, and is very popular. The press has a fairly small circulation and is mainly addressed to the elite and urban dwellers. Although its region has long ranked low in western press freedom ratings, The Reporters Without Borders 2005 list puts Cambodia highest, at number 90 out of 167 countries.

Cambodian bloggers opening up conservative society
AFP reports that the 'clogger' society is growing rapidly in Cambodia's conservative society as the digital word spreads even to rural areas through help from MNCs such as Microsoft and US aid agencies. Also reported are the challenges, lessons and consequences of blogging in Cambodia.

Society of cambodian bloggers, aka 'cloggers', keep track of each other through grou.ps.

Roles:

Casual interaction through chat and social networks:
Hi5: popular international social network many Cambodians subscribe to
Cambodian Chat
Mitleap: first social networking site in Khmer language
Khmeryou.com: A Cambodian social network community
Yahoo Instant Messaging

Historical recollections:
Cambodia: The Shadow of the Past by Tharum Bun
Blogs in Cambodia can function as two-way communication tool weblog can be deployed as way for people to comfortably tell their own stories, thoughts, and memory of the past.

Religious blogs/networks:
Cambodian Christian social network
Cambodia Christian Missionary blog
The Buddhist Blog

Fighting crime:
Cambodian Media struggles through hard times: The digital revolution helps track criminals, including human traffickers and drug dealers . Many poorly educated girls in the countryside have been cheated by relatives and human traffickers.

Politics:
Details Are Sketchy set up a page listing websites banned by the Cambodian government, 'meant to provide a central point were the Internet community can track web sites the Cambodian government refuses to let its citizens view and provide alternative methods of reaching those pages'.
These include:
Reahu
Sacrava Toons
Global Witness 'Country for sale' report

Cambodia Internet Usage and Telecommunications Report
E-commerce is very limited

Popular blogs include:
Former King Sihanouk's blog
Beth Kanter
Kalyan
Keno

Others

There are reaons behind the media lockdown such as Cambodia's thriving porn industry. 3G phones are banned for another decade in 2006 in hopes that it would save the country's 'social morality'.

Some barriers
- Very few computers in the rural areas
- Only the urban areas like Phnom Penh & Siem Reap have access to computers; however it is still very expensive to use/ possess a computer there (even university students have to pay to use the computers on their campuses)
- Low internet access/speed across the country
- A little resistance from government (keeping number of ISPs low)