What is Republic Asia?
Republic Asia is a website that provides a platform for the young generation to tell and share their stories. It’s for them to be heard and be counted.

Who's the target audience of the publication?
The target audience is Gen Zs and millennials in the Philippines.

What kind of stories does Republic Asia produce and what topics usually catch your audience's interest?
It mainly produces stories that appeal to Gen Zs and millennials. There's a gap amongst millennials and baby boomers and Gen Y on their news diets, so the type of stories we do are often those that you don't normally see in national daily news. We're heavy on how-tos and features. Showbiz stories are not specific on generations but apparently, lately, there's been big interest on Korean novelas, K-Pop culture. We also try to do a lot of community stories from the provinces because one of our investors, I think his main condition for giving us capital was to do more stories in the provinces that are rarely covered. 

What makes you different from other publications?
We try not to write stories that are breaking but don't have any context. We're heavy on social media because that's where our target audience is, but we would like them to go back to reading. 

What is Republic Asia's editorial focus for 2023?
For 2023, we would like to reach out more to the youth, so we're planning to have more collaborations with schools and with community newspapers and community radio and digital news organisations. We'd like them to contribute for us, and at the same time, if they like our content, we can also provide our content to their publication. We will also collaborate with (still undisclosed) entities regarding financial literacy and content creation.

Any upcoming features you're looking forward to writing? 
We would like to keep on with our campaign for safer kids online because that's our main story when we started, so we'd like to keep pursuing that as our advocacy.

How can local and international PR professionals work with Republic Asia?
Republic Asia is open to receiving story leads and pitches. PR professionals can contact the publication by email.

What makes a good story pitch for Republic Asia?
As long as it's organic, as long as it's original, in any language or dialect, we can pick it up. And if you have very good visuals, we can put them on TikTok.

Thank you Malou Talosig-Bartolome, Senior Deputy Editor, for doing this interview with us.