The New York Times has been granted a licence to open an office in Vietnam, VN Express has reported. It’s not known where the office will be located but it’s been speculated that the company could open an office as soon as next month.
Of note, it’s not easy to do business in Vietnam for foreign news media outlets. Vietnam’s media industry is small and heavily regulated, particularly in terms of censoring content, though this does not seem to apply to international media outlets to the extent that it does to local news media producers.
That said, foreign news operations in Vietnam are still limited in terms of what they can do. Most of their operations need to be run past the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and they are still supposed to abide by standard Vietnamese journalistic practices, submitting questions in advance and allowing interviewees to review their responses before publication, for example.