Asian Correspondent

» see asiancorrespondent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In the second week of December 2019 the International Court of Justice at The Hague heard Aung San Suu Kyi defend Myanmar against a charge of genocide, and that was front-page news in every country with a foreign desk, including mine. It was also the last big story Asian Correspondent ever led with. The site had spent ten years covering exactly that region for an English-reading audience, and it was about a month from switching off when the story it was built for finally arrived.

It launched in October 2009 under Hybrid News Limited, whose Asian newsroom was registered at Q Sentral in Kuala Lumpur. The format was a mix of professional reporting and outside bloggers published under one masthead, which at the time got it compared to the Huffington Post. It hit its millionth visitor in May 2010, inside eight months of launching, and it became the Associated Press's online partner for the Asia-Pacific, which meant wire copy sitting on the same front page as a Bangkok blogger's election live-post.

The coverage was broad enough to be quoted elsewhere on the strength of the reporting rather than the aggregation. Quartz cited it for the 2014 Thai military coup and for a bitcoin story the year before. Its sections ran from politics and environment through to education and travel, and it kept separate country verticals, Thailand and Malaysia among them.

~ the record ~

~ nine days wide ~

The last full capture of the homepage is 12 December 2019, and it is not the homepage of a dying site. It carries 24 articles dated that same month, with a lead story on the ICJ hearings. The archive shows ordinary pages still being served as late as 6 January 2020.

Nine days later the whole thing is gone. The first capture of 15 January 2020 is a three-kilobyte Unbounce landing page where a fifty-kilobyte newspaper used to be. Nobody wrote a farewell post and nobody announced anything. The archive's gap between the last working page and the first dead one is nine days wide, and that is as close as this death gets to a date.

~ currently unavailable ~

The replacement page said two things. The first was "Currently unavailable". The second was "Copyright © 2020. Hybrid. All Rights Reserved." A decade of Southeast Asian reporting under a wire partnership with the AP, reduced to a holding page with a copyright line on it, built in a marketing-landing-page tool because that was presumably what the company already had a license for.

~ what hybrid kept ~

Hybrid did not go out of business. It kept publishing, under a different name, for a different audience: asiancorrespondent.com was pointed at techhq.com, the company's technology title, and anyone following an old link about Thai politics landed on enterprise IT coverage instead. Wikipedia's article still records the death as September 2021, which is simply the date some editor noticed the redirect. The newsroom had already been dark for twenty months by then.

Today even the redirect is gone. asiancorrespondent.com still has an A record pointing at an Amazon address and answers on neither port 80 nor 443, so the domain is held by somebody who is not serving anything from it. The ten years of copy exist only in the Internet Archive, where the country verticals come back intact and the bylines still work.

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