AMIC History Book Launched

AMIC@50: A History of the Asian Media Information Centre was launched last December on the occasion of AMIC’s golden jubilee. It is a 200-page story of the organization founded and registered in Singapore in 1971 and now based in Manila since 2015.

The book is edited by Crispin C. Maslog, a participant in the unique travelling seminar in 1971 that took 13 Asian mass communication educators on a 25-day trip to 11 cities in Asia from Singapore to Seoul and led to its founding.

Most of the chapters are written by the former AMIC secretaries-general—Vijay Menon, Jose Ma. Carlos, Sundeep Muppidi, Martin Hadlow, Ramon Tuazon and Maria Fajardo Robles. Some chapters are written by proxies—Sankaran Ramanathan, Eddie Kuo, John Lent and Crispin C. Maslog.

AMIC is proprietor of the Asian Journal of Communication (AJC) and Media Asia. AJC comes out bi-monthly with scholarly articles preferably dealing with Asian research topics and methodologies. , Media Asia is a peer reviewed journal that focuses on practices in journalism, advertising, public relations, and other aspects of media in Asia. 

The traveling seminar was followed by the Communication Teaching and Training Conference in Seoul in 1972 which recommended the First Reading Material Workshop in October 1974. The workshop urged three priority subject areas for anthologies– a history of mass communication in Asia, Asian broadcasting, and Asian journalism. This led in 1978 to the research and writing of the first AMIC book, A Brief History of Asian Mass Communication, edited by Sir Charles Moses and Crispin C. Maslog.