The state-owned News and Periodicals Enterprise (NPE) is the largest publisher in Myanmar. It was established in 1965 as the Newspapers Supervisory Committee and became the News and Periodicals Corporation in 1972 and the News and Periodicals Enterprise in 1998. It publishes Myanma Alinn (founded in 1914), Kyemon (founded in 1957) and The Global New Light of Myanmar (a newspaper first published in 1964 as The Working People’s Daily).
NPE also operates the Myanmar News Agency, the country’s official news agency, whose history dates back to 1962, when it was founded as The Revolutionary Council News Agency.
As of 2017, NPE also runs Myanmar Digital News, a news portal created by a private company (Megalink Advanced Technologies) with the goal of aggregating content from all of NPE’s print publications, as well as publishing original content created by the portal.
Media assets
Publishing: Myanma Alinn, Kyemon, The Global New Light of Myanmar
News agency: Myanmar News Agency (MNA)
News portal: Myanmar Digital News
State Media Matrix Typology: State-Controlled (SC)
Ownership and governance
NPE is owned and operated by the Myanmar Ministry of Information. NPE’s management, including the Director General, is appointed by the Ministry.
Source of funding and budget
There is no publicly available information on the NPE’s annual budget. According to local journalists and experts interviewed for this report in May 2024, although most of NPE’s publications are encouraged by the Ministry of Information to generate revenue from advertising, the largest part of NPE’s budget (over 80%) comes from the government.
Editorial independence
NPE publications are known in Myanmar as government mouthpieces, according to local journalists interviewed for this report in May 2024. Their mission is to promote the government’s views and interests. According to the ministry’s website, the mission of the NPE’s publications is to “focus on publishing newspapers that are in line with the vision of the Ministry of Information to inform, educate and entertain.”
There is no statute and no independent evaluating/supervising mechanism that would guarantee the editorial independence of the NPE’s outlets.
September 2024