Newspaper industry vendors have been told that a new technical group named ASEAN Newspaper Printers (ANP) will organise a conference in Surabaya, Indonesia, in September, as originally planned by SEANG.

Chairman and president Anthony Cheng – who is production executive vice president at Singapore Press Holdings – has told equipment and consumables suppliers that a new nonprofit organisation has been incorporated in Singapore. Its board includes Cheng, SPH assistant vice president Jimmy Oo, Star general manager Mohd Hassan Mohd Ali, NSTP general manager Aszman Kasmani, and Utusan production manager Farouq Affandi bin Mamat.

Cheng says ANP is privileged to have been given permission by the ASEAN secretariat in

Singapore to adopt the proprietary ASEAN name which reflects the proper jurisdiction and image of the organisation.

A board meeting in Kuala Lumpur decided to go ahead with the Surabaya conference from September 12-14, a week earlier than originally planned. Cheng says he has personally inspected the venue at Shangri-La Surabaya, and is “counting on our comrades and partners in the newspaper industry” for their continued support.

The new organisation follows the pioneering work done by the organisers of three annual South East Asia Newspaper Group conferences, modelled on Australia’s SWUG and held in Bangkok and Jakarta, and takes its history in an unusual direction.

When delegates at SEANG’s second conference in 2009 voted Cheng as its president, little did they expect that he might emerge as head of a parallel organisation. Cheng says the new Singapore-based technical association “replaces” SEANG, although it is not clear that the original regional association, headquartered in Bangkok, has closed.

Three SEANG conferences – two in Bangkok and a third in Jakarta – have attracted a growing number of attendees as industry organisations including media partner GXpress got behind it.

As had become the practice, delegates joined committee members at the end of the at the well-attended Jakarta event last September to discuss ideas for upcoming events including the 2011 conference.

Founding president Stephan Peters, whose team did most of the work for the first conferences, says it was always the intention that representatives of newspaper sites would take over running of the organisation from a founding group made up primarily of supplier representatives.

“However, we never expected the change to take this form or be so sudden,” he says. “I still believe that the most important factor is the role a regional group can play in networking and the education of technical management in the industry. That’s really more important than the differences between two groups with similar aims.

“There’s also a real need for something like this for smaller newspapers in countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines.”

• In a statement to GXpress (August 3) the ANP board says committee members unanimously agreed to set up ANP in Singapore after evaluating rules and regulations in various ASEAN countries, and close down SEANG. The statement raises other issues about the previous (Thai) organsanisation and transfer arrangements, some of which are disputed by previous committee members.