On August 1, 2023, veteran foreign correspondent and author James Borton launched the South China Sea NewsWire, which aggregates the most essential coverage, books, conferences, podcasts, and other media about the region. Updated monthly, the site also includes easy-to-digest summaries of featured content. The NewsWire aims to be the information destination on the South China Sea’s politics, economics, and biodiversity for academics, professionals, and anyone else interested in the area.

The South China Sea is an area of immense economic and political importance, with large oil and natural gas reserves and substantial fishery resources. A third of global trade flows through the region. Understanding the South China Sea, and the politics within, is more vital than ever.

“News related to the South China Sea holds geostrategic importance; staying informed about developments is crucial for policymakers, businesses, academics, and the general public to understand how events in the region can affect global politics, security, and economic interests,” says Borton, author of Dispatches from the South China Sea: Navigating to Common Ground. “We intend to provide a mix of balanced and insightful news that favors discovery over opinion,” he adds.

The site is powered in partnership with the Perigon News API. Perigon uses AI-enriched technology to provide structured, intelligently classified news data in real-time from over 80,000 global sources and counting. “We’re excited to support this project which leverages our technology to find the very best coverage on an important beat and fuel a hub for high-quality information,” says Perigon CEO Joshua Dziabiak. “We hope to explore more use cases like this in the future, and continue supporting experts, journalists, and academics with our tools.”

James Borton is a foreign correspondent who has been reporting on Southeast Asia for more than 30 years. He is a past non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center, US-Asia Institute, and is currently a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is joined in this venture by David Hessen, a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins SAIS.

You can find the South China Sea NewsWire at the following link https://southchinaseanewswire.com/