Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on March 21 - 27, 2016.

 

The outpouring of good wishes from readers of The Malaysian Insider (TMI) when the news portal was shut down last Monday speaks volumes about the impact that it had on Malaysians.

This was doubtless in no small part due to its "courageous news reporting", as The Edge Media Group Publisher and Group CEO Ho Kay Tat said when announcing the decision to shut the popular news site down for commercial reasons.

Clearly, the journalists at TMI responded to an inner calling to report the news that matters, even if it may upset the authorities.

This honesty would certainly have resonated with its readers, whose support made it among the top three news sites in Malaysia.

In the end, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission's blocking of TMI, as Ho said, made it more difficult for The Edge Media Group to dispose of it as part of the group's restructuring exercise.

But TMI's closure does nothing to stop the public's thirst for free access to information. Thanks to the enabling technology of online communications, the barriers that had made information a restricted commodity in the pre-Internet era have become clumsy anachronisms.

Today, developments like mobile applications have put the power of publishing literally in everyone’s hands. Consequently, information flows have taken on a life of their own and make nonsense of old concepts of newsmaking.

In this environment, it is inevitable that communicators, whether courageous, entertaining or simply compulsive, will multiply ad nauseam merely because the means to broadcast information is so readily available.

So, we can be sure that writers with a cause, like the brave journalists who made TMI an institution in its eight years in operation, will find other means to present the news about events that belong in the public domain.

Nevertheless, the financial challenges of sustaining an online news organisation are a Gordian knot of the current age.

The Pew Research Centre’s State of the News Media 2015 report sheds some light on the difficult media terrain today. While US newspaper ad revenue declined 4% to US$19.9 billion in 2014, during the year in review, digital ad revenue across all media grew 18% to US$50.7 billion. Ominously for legacy media, the amount that advertisers spent on print ads was less than half that of a decade ago.

In contrast, mobile ad spending alone increased 78%, making up 37% of all digital ad expenditure. Unfortunately for the media industry, it is not really the beneficiary of this upsurge in revenue, but a somewhat incidental party to this new phenomenon. The writing on the Facebook wall could not be clearer. As the Pew report notes: “While new relationships have been struck between news organisations and tech companies like Facebook, the tech companies still control more of the arrangement and reap most of the financial benefit. Facebook now pulls in roughly a quarter (24%) of all display ad revenue and more than a third (37%) of mobile display.”

The situation is complicated by an element of unpredictability about the viability of digital news ventures. Some media initiatives have ended in dramatic collapses while others have chalked up impressive growth. The report cites a few prominent cases of troubled outfits from 2014. Pertinently, all involved management conflicts.

First Look Media, which launched in 2014 with an infusion of US$50 million from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, closed a signature news product, The Racket, before publishing a single story. Another unit, an investigative outlet named The Intercept, lost a key hire over editorial direction.

The tech journalism outlet Gigaom, funded with over US$20 million in venture capital, shut down in March 2015, with no warning even to staff, when it found itself unable to pay its creditors. Similarly, BuzzFeed had to deal with ethical questions concerning censorship and The New Republic faced mutiny over editorial issues.

Others like general interest sites Vice.com and Vox.com, on the other hand, have found the golden touch, registering 14 million and 15 million unique visitors in a single month.

The multifarious challenges range from the rapid introduction of game-changing developments to the fragmentation of revenue sources to the fleeting loyalties of followers and more. This mix of pressures is forcing media organisations to take apart failing units with increasing frequency. In the process, more media employees are suddenly finding themselves looking for new jobs.

The Pew Report sums up the dilemma of media operations in the digital era thus: “... if news in the social space is more incidental and driven to a large degree by friends and algorithms, then gaining a foothold there may be even more elusive — or at least less in the industry’s own hands — than a secure financial model.”

Experiments with different financial models are ongoing, and the jury is still out on which of them could really work. Although some subscription-based publications are holding their own, the Internet culture of free access to content makes that model unworkable except for specialised information, or a mix of free and paid content. Calls to support independent journalism through public funding or crowdfunding are a standard refrain in discussions on the issue, but these

ideas have not yet shaped up as mainstream modes of operation.

Meanwhile, for the breed of journalists who made TMI the go-to news source on issues of national as well as local interest, there may well be more dark nights ahead as they strive to answer their calling in a volatile environment.

But there is no question that they will respond to that inner voice that tells them to report the story as it is, because that is what journalists do, no matter who says they can’t.


R B Bhattacharjee is associate editor at The Edge Malaysia

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