Ethics

Last update: May, 2024

We take ethics and transparency very seriously here at Tech in Asia, and we strive to provide you with coverage that is fair, accurate, and transparent. To accomplish that, we operate our publication based on the principles we’ve shared with you below.

We also welcome questions, comments, and concerns about our coverage, and we invite you to contact us with any issues you might have.

Investments

Newsroom staff and paid contributors of Tech in Asia Media may not, through a direct buy or sell relationship, acquire a position in any equities or bonds in companies that they will likely report on. Any interest in these companies should be held through mutual funds or similar arrangements where the decisions to buy, sell, or hold the securities are made by an independent money manager or trustee.

Newsroom staff and paid contributors can own digital assets like tokens or NFTs issued by crypto entities. However, if they own substantial amounts of any particular token (more than 10% of their monthly income), they are to disclose this on their author profile page and update it regularly (example here). Exemptions to this policy apply to stablecoins.

Our policy on crypto is a work-in-progress as the field is evolving fast. Tokens are not just investment assets; they often function like currency and even digital tickets. As such, an outright ban on owning digital assets does not make sense and is detrimental to a journalist’s efforts at understanding crypto.

Conflict of interest

All Tech in Asia’s staff members and paid contributors may not profit from private information learned during an assignment. They may not use their position at the company to obtain a favorable deal. They may not withhold negative coverage of a company to protect the value of their holdings, or provide positive coverage to increase the value of their holdings.

All new Tech in Asia’s staff members and paid contributors who are about to join a team or accept an assignment must disclose potential conflicts of interest to the manager immediately. For full-time staff with holdings that might present a conflict of interest, the preferred course of action would be for them to divest their holdings within 30 days of joining the team or taking on the assignment.

Our community team accepts guest posts written by people in the tech industry because we believe this insider’s view has value for our readers. But we also make sure our guest posts are clearly labeled as such, and that our guest writers clearly disclose to readers any potential conflicts of interest, including who they are, where they work, and anything they have a financial stake in which is related to the article.

Funding

Our financing timeline so far:

Tech in Asia (then known as Penn Olson) received seed investment from East Ventures (EV) in 2011
In early 2013, we received a second round of financing from Simile Venture Partners in which EV also participated
Our third round of financing came from Fenox Venture Capital in August 2013
In January 2015, Tech in Asia entered the Y Combinator winter 2015 batch
In June 2015, SB ISAT Fund, Walden International, Marvelstone, m&s Partners, Mr. Eduardo Saverin (co-founder of Facebook) and Mr. Andrew James Solimine (co-founder of Nitrous) invested in the company
In November 2017, Hanwha invested in the company
In January 2024, Tech in Asia was fully acquired by SPH Media

We made it very clear to our ex-investors and ex-board of directors that the editorial team will maintain full editorial control of the publication’s content. Our ex-investors’ portfolio companies and fellow Y Combinator graduates will occasionally get coverage from us, not because we’ve been ordered to cover them (we haven’t), but because we find the story interesting. Even though SPH Media owns us completely, we make our own decisions about what stories to cover.

Our sole criteria when choosing stories is generally whether or not we think our readers will find it valuable, and for this reason, we have passed on stories pitched by our ex-investors’ portfolio of startups when they fail to meet this criteria (just like we pass on any story that fails to meet this criteria).

Advertising

Like most websites, Tech in Asia runs advertisements from companies in Asia’s tech sphere, or accepts financial sponsorship for an event. But we make a clear distinction between our editorial content and any advertisements or sponsorship that we might accept. Our content remains independent, and will not be influenced or swayed by advertisers or sponsors. Our editorial team is wholly independent and is not involved with the sale of advertisements.

We do not sell mentions, in-article image advertisements, or any other form of advertisement that might influence the quality of our content. However, we will sell native advertisements that are relevant to our audience. These articles will be clearly labeled sponsored with “In partnership with company X” at the beginning of the piece. The identity of the advertisers will also be disclosed.

Some of our advertisers paid us in cryptocurrencies. But we do not hold any cryptocurrencies at this point.

Editorial process

Every story published on Tech in Asia goes through one of our editors – usually more than just one. These editors have complete editorial control over the content of the publication, and they are totally segregated from the business team. They are not in contact with advertisers or event sponsors or involved with the financial affairs of the publication.

As editors, we’re fans of journalism done right, and are big believers that transparency is the new objectivity. If we have a strong viewpoint on a topic, or some connection to it, we’ll let you know about it. We do not aspire to a mythical ‘view-from-nowhere’ objectivity, but instead we will try to tell you where we are coming from with appropriate transparency (see above link) and present the story as we see it. We hope that you, the reader, will appreciate our efforts to be honest about where we’re coming from.

We strive for speed, accuracy, and insight in our coverage, but like any publication, we fall short from time to time. Wherever we discover them, we correct errors immediately and mark major corrections transparently with an ‘update’ label, and we encourage readers to let us know when we’ve made an error [1].

Sources

All of our stories are clearly sourced. We get stories from all over the place. Sometimes we find them ourselves, sometimes we obtain information from sites in Asian languages, and sometimes they’re suggested by our contributors or our readers. But wherever a story comes from, we’ll make sure it’s clearly marked and, where applicable, linked.

On some occasions, we may quote or use information from anonymous sources. We will fiercely protect the identities of our sources, but we’ll also be sure readers know as much as we can safely reveal about why we’re using an anonymous source in the first place.

Fairness

While we don’t shy away from being critical, we do attempt to be fair in our coverage. To that end, we try to get in touch with companies we’re writing big stories about to give them a chance to comment. If you feel you or your company has been treated unfairly in our coverage, please get in touch with us immediately.

We also make sure to differentiate between opinion pieces and news pieces. Personal opinions in our posts will be clearly labeled as such (i.e. “I think…”) and will not be presented as though they are fact or news.

Gifts

In the event we review gadgets and software (though we rarely do so these days), we will return all gadgets loaned to us for the purposes of a product review and will not keep them for personal usage. We will not accept gadgets from manufacturers, resellers, or retailers as gifts on any occasion and will only pay for them out of our own pockets or those of Tech in Asia’s.

The editorial team will occasionally receive gifts from newsmakers. To maintain objectivity, we will return/raffle/dispose gifts that are not food and are over US$5 in value.

We would also encourage our PR and marketing partners to refrain from sending us physical gifts or preparing physical media kits. This is in line with Tech in Asia’s goal of reducing the carbon footprint and achieving carbon neutrality. A virtual thank you will be more than enough.

We will, on occasion, accept sponsored trips. If any coverage results from such sponsored trips, we will disclose as such at the bottom of the articles.

Events

We hold annual “Tech in Asia” conferences. All speakers are selected because our team believes they can provide valuable content to our audience. Content on stage and/or on our publication has no relationship with sponsorships. We make it extremely clear to every sponsor that they will not be able to influence the onstage content of the event. The same applies to the content on our publication.

Startups participating in Arena, our startup pitching competition, are all selected based on the uniqueness of their idea and then a video or face-to-face interview with one or two of our team members. Startup Arena’s winners are picked by independent judges. The Tech in Asia team has no impact on the choice of winners, and neither do event sponsors.

Regarding the monetization of our publication and events, a specific Walt Disney quote is useful to reference here:

“We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”

Likewise, we hope that we can do well enough to keep bringing you news about Asia for years to come.

You can see one example of how we do that here.