Broadcast Journalism in Vietnam: TV Station Manager Talks About His Career

I interviewed Hoa Nguyen, a Humphrey Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a journalist. In Vietnam, he is the deputy manager of Ho Chi Minh Television Station, where he does a variety of tasks to help support and run the station. At the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Vietnam, he studied English literature and journalism.

He notes that a career in Journalism does not require a major in it, because journalism requires expertise in precise areas, so people with other majors would also do well in the field. In Vietnam, he managed a staff of about eighteen people, of which he supervised and assigned tasks to.

From the interview, I learned about how working in an environment that demanded speed and accuracy worked. He describes the station office as being very hectic and busy, because there are always people coming in and out in order to gather or report news. Despite the chaos, there must also be lots of supervision, because the managers need to make sure that the facts and figures reported are correct. If something incorrect is broadcast, then the upper-level people at the station are held responsible.

His job demands a lot of reading and constant attention to detail. He is responsible for editing news reports and giving out news reporting tasks to his staff. He also works with technical equipment, and makes sure that videos are in the correct format before they are broadcast.

Concerning international components of the job, Mr. Nguyen mentions that in his job as a deputy manager (and also because he knows English), he often interacts with many foreigners. These foreigners often come from the U.K., or from America, and some gives seminars while others work at NGOs or foreign-investment-type organizations in Vietnam. He stresses that interacting with these foreigners requires knowledge of the Western cultural mindset, and how it differs from East Asian culture. For example, he talked about how the power distance is set wider in Asian cultures, and that Westerners (in general) required more facts and proof before their minds could be changed (whereas in East Asia, people are more accepting of something automatically if a superior/elder said it).

My impression of the workplace is that it is a very tough job, because news changes daily and one must always keep up with the information to ensure that it is accurate and up-to-date. I think that this job would appeal to me, because I like fast-paced environments where there are always new challenges and things to be learned. This interview did not change my previous ideas about the job, because I always had the impression that working in news would require speed, and lots of attention to facts and figures.