An Actor in the Vietnamese Media Landscape : A Case Study of the Online Newspaper VnExpress

There are no private media in Vietnam, all media activity is owned and controlled by the State and the Vietnamese media landscape is therefore relatively closed and strangled. It is not allowed to produce any news material which criticise the government or put it in bad days. In 1997, the Internet was introduced in Vietnam and online newspapers started to establish. Through investigating the underlying factors of the development and success of one of the biggest online newspapers in Vietnam, VnExpress, our study intends to describe how it has affected the Vietnamese media landscape. Based in Hanoi during ten weeks, we performed this minor field study with the support from Swedish International Development Cooperation Association, SIDA. Our case study is made from five in-depth interviews. The research questions deals with VnExpress in particular; how they have developed, how they consider their purpose as an online publication and what they find unique about their newspaper. Through the empirical findings, we can distinguish a couple of factors with which VnExpress has affected the Vietnamese media landscape. First of all, we found that their policy of always reporting news in an objective point of view has made them respected among competitors and used by the same as a source of news material. Furthermore, their close contact to readers through different channels at the editorial, giving them the opportunity to express their thoughts, makes the readers engaged and able to form their own opinions about the society. To achieve the above, it is significant that VnExpress has a unique ownership allowing them to work as free and limitless as possible in a country like Vietnam. Finally, we can see that the Vietnamese media landscape tends to become more open and we claim that online newspapers and Internet in general will have a great impact of its development