A new dawn for radio in Myanmar

The elegant Burmese lady who has just stood up can't be more than 22; but she's talking about the two FM radio stations that she runs, so I guess she must be.

I'm in Manado in Indonesia, for the Asian Media Summit. I'm sitting slightly awkwardly on a table at the side of a large room, since this table has access to one of the only power points in the room and now I've found it I'm staying here, in spite of the comfy seats that everyone else is sitting on.

Hia Yin Aye, for that is elegant Burmese lady's name, was trained as a computer software engineer, and, her biography notes, graduated in 2007. Now she's running two radio stations, Mandalay FM and Pyinsawadi FM. It might seem odd for a computer software engineer to have skipped into radio production; but there again, it might have been difficult to train to do radio in Myanmar, her home country, because they didn't really have any until recently.

She's tremendously excited: infectiously so. She goes through her PowerPoint talking about the two stations that she looks after. And she's tremendously proud.

It turns out that radio in Myanmar sounded a little different to radio here. All of it - all of it - was pre-recorded. Myanmar, as you'll remember, used to be anything other than a open country. General Than Shwe, the former military leader, ran a government that eschewed any contact with the rest of the world. So, running pre-recorded programming that could be listened-to before it was broadcast was a good way to control the media and ensure that nothing was broadcast that shouldn't have been. (If only the BBC had tried this with Russell Brand. Oh.)

Now, however, Myanmar has had their first elections and is opening up. There are a large number of outside agencies helping train the media. Swedish Radio is working with Aye's two stations: there was precious little news coverage before, so the concept of journalism is not as natural as it might be to us.

And this explains her enthusiasm. Because, on 1 May, she broadcast the first live programme on her station. It was a magazine show (at drivetime, incidentally), covering everything from travel to cookery, and they used social media to get feedback from the audience - who must have been shocked to suddenly hear their names on the radio within minutes of tweeting or Facebooking.

The first live radio programme. Wow.

And then, to applause, she sits down, and opens her BlackBerry to update Facebook.

What a difference a few years makes to a country's media.