Veteran journalist Yuwadee Tunyasiri dies, aged 71

Yuwadee, 71, had been in the Phramongkutklao Hospital intensive care unit since last Friday, when she suffered gastrointestinal bleeding, temporarily depriving her brain of oxygen and causing low blood pressure.
Yuwadee’s funeral will be held from Saturday to March 17 at Soamanas Temple, with her royally sponsored cremation to take place on March 19. She is survived by her husband, General Sirichai Tunyasiri, a former permanent secretary to the Defence Ministry, and their son.
She left a legacy as a straightforward journalist who constantly questioned more than 20 governments she had seen throughout her career.
Her reporting career started in 1968 at the then-Bangkok World newspaper, which offered her a permanent job as an intern after she left Thammasat University. The publication was later purchased by the Bangkok Post, where she served as a field reporter until her retirement.
“The journalists’ image wasn’t so good back then, I have to say. I often got asked: are you going to be one of those journalists, sitting on stairs?” she said in an interview last year with the Thai Journalists Association (TJA). “Adventure loving as I was, I gave it a go.”
A journalist’s life back then was not easy, Yuwadee often said. With no portable telephone or computer, she made dozens of trips between reporting assignments and her office to type the news on paper. 
The old-styled military rule was another thing obstacle she overcame. Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn did not allow journalists, including newcomer Yuwadee, to enter Government House at all unless invited for a press briefing. Reporters had to wait by the fence of the government building to receive press releases.
Conditions improved with successive, more democratic governments. A press room, nicknamed “sparrows’ nest”, was built during the time of General Kriangsak Chamanan in the late 1980s. Reporters flocked there, seizing one of the limited number of telephone landlines that would allow them to keep in contact with their newsrooms.
From the “sparrows’ nest”, which has now expanded to three, she got to observe one coup after another. The latest was in 2014 by the junta head General Prayut Chan-o-cha, who also became the premier.
It was also during Prayut’s ruling that Yuwadee was, for the first time, banned from entering the Government House compound last November, given to her lack of affiliation. Since then, she had been using the TJA office as an alternative workplace.
“It’s a pity that journalists nowadays tend to do less investigative reports and more routine ones,” she said in a later interview. “The main tasks of journalists are to report facts and scrutinise what can go wrong”.