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Dunkley’s chance

Ross Dunkley is alarmingly brash. Up close and personal, the Australian publisher prides himself as a straight talker who readily indulges his critics.

It’s an attitude he took to The Phnom Penh Post when its founder, American Michael Hayes, was brought out just over a year ago.

Then the newspaper was published once every two weeks—now it’s a daily and a separate 44-page edition published in Khmer was launched last Wednesday.

“In just over four months our staff numbers went from 12 to over 100, we found and renovated state-of-the-art offices, found and fitted out our factory, and we were ready to go in less than six months,” Mr Dunkley said of going daily.

“It’s a great achievement and proves that in Cambodia you can get things done.”

And of the Khmer edition Mr Dunkley is as equally gushing.

“We’ll spread it around for free for four weeks I think, and the comments out on the street this morning are ‘Wow, we’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s beautiful’.”

However, it’s not an achievement that’s likely to be repeated in Thailand. Dunkley scotched months of rumours that his Post Media Company was looking to buy this paper’s chief competitor, The Nation.

“Of course, blind Freddy will tell you The Nation is potentially gasping for air and is on its knees. Incompetence is finally catching up with them,” he said.

“Market analysts are also arriving at the same conclusion, so I wonder how long it will be before we see the group collapsing like a deck of cards. It wouldn’t take much. We are not particularly interested,” he said bluntly.

“How could we be when foreign ownership is capped at 30% and at the board level 25%, which is strange in itself. Navigating the minefield of politics would also be quite a task. I wonder wouldn’t it be better to go farther afield for investment opportunities?”

His comments are something of a cringing indictment given that Mr Dunkley has made a career out of building newspapers in countries that are widely regarded as being far more difficult than Thailand and are openly hostile to the press.

Burma and Vietnam are the most notable, while Cambodia, where Post Media hopes to expand into radio and television, had for decades been typecast as the region’s political and economic basket case.

Mr Dunkley grew up a lifetime away in Western Australia.

“After boarding school I jackarooed [trainee on a livestock farm] in the Riverina of New South Wales and then studied agricultural economics at university. I wanted to go home to the farm, but kept fighting with my father in the cattle yards.”

Instead, he took a cadetship at The Stock and Land newspaper in Melbourne and two years later in 1982 he won a prestigious Walkley Award for the paper’s coverage of Australia’s notorious waterfront strikes.

But he remained restless, headed back to Perth and worked as an editor before venturing into custom publishing—with uninspiring results.

“I got screwed by the cartel of big publishers, Murdoch, Fairfax and Rural Press, and I learned a big lesson; you don’t threaten the big boys.”

He left Australia for Vietnam and became a partner in the Vietnam Investment Review (VIR) in 1991, which was just setting up shop.

In those years VIR was a watershed for the press in Vietnam. Physically and politically, the country was still struggling to rebuild itself after decades of conflict and the Cold War had just ended.

The heyday of Hanoi’s relationship with Russia was over and the Vietnamese politburo was beginning to experiment with a new era of openness and economic policies known as Doi Moi.

Despite the political mind games—which Vietnamese communists are famous for—VIR stuck with its economic remit and was well regarded for its financial reporting.

“Our timing was impeccable and we rode the wave upwards, selling to James Packer in 1994 and I stayed on as a manger until my contract ran out in ’97, which coincided with the Asian financial big bang.”

Mr Dunkley divided his time between Europe and Perth, swapped roles with his wife and became a house dad for his two children and established a business relationship with Bill Clough, who heads an extensive network of family companies, principally involved with mining.

“In between, I travelled to Myanmar [Burma] every month negotiating with the military. Myself and my partner Bill Clough founded The Myanmar Times at the dawn of the new millennium and here I am at the end of 10 years in Yangon [Rangoon].”

It was far from carefree. The authorities jailed Mr Dunkley’s Burmese business partner and the newspaper’s co-founder Sonny Swe, ostensibly for censorship violations. He was given 14 years—seven years for the English edition and seven for the Burmese edition.

“Actually, he didn’t really do anything wrong. It was just plain politics and he was caught in the crossfire,” Mr Dunkley said. “We were given a new partner and I was given an assurance from the government that I was free to run the company and the newspapers.”

The Myanmar Times is published in both languages. The stable includes NOW! magazine and a crime tabloid staffed by 400 people with bureaux in Mandalay and the capital Naypyidaw.

The plan in Burma is not unlike the strategy for Cambodia, to take The Myanmar Times daily and break an almost 50-year state monopoly on newspaper publishing.

But doing deals with a military junta is unlikely to win over too many friends, and Mr Dunkley doesn’t seemed too fazed.

“I’m on the playing field, engaged in the game. I’m not shrieking from the sidelines, hysterical, because I cannot influence the result.

“When I met [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon in Yangon he congratulated me, encouraged me, and urged me to continue on with our good work. We have trained more than 100 journalists over a decade.

“I call that capacity building, and there are a large group of publishers, editors and journalists in Myanmar who have similar views to myself. We see light at the end of the tunnel.”

In Cambodia, the purchase of The Phnom Penh Post—a much different beast to VIR or The Myanmar Times—marked the end of an era.

Renowned correspondent Jim Pringle once called it “the greatest little newspaper on Earth“, and under Hayes it had won an enviable reputation as a paper of record where many of the region’s best journalists have cut their teeth.

Recognising the paper needed a cash injection to survive and thrive, Hayes sold just over a year ago for an undisclosed sum. He retains an editorial and consultancy position.

Post Media has been touted for potential stock market listing if Cambodia succeeds in launching a stock exchange next year, which would provide investors with the opportunity to cash-up on their initial outlay.

Despite the industry being savaged by the digital age and cheap internet content, Mr Dunkley’s optimism is unflinching.

“ThePost is not profitable and even less so this week as we pushed out our second daily in 12 months,” he said as 10,000 copies of the Khmer edition ran off the presses.

“We’ve invested millions of dollars. It will take time to bring this all back into the black. But, our fundamentals are correct.

“We will see this project be commercially viable in a short amount of time.

“We have made the correct decision to invest here.”

© Copyright 2009, The Post Publishing Public Company Limited