MGG Pillai Commentary View

<< Previous || Next >>

Why after half a century I have stopped reading the New Straits Times

THE INDIAN AND BRITISH HIGH Commissioners – let us put aside for a moment the propriety of foreign ambassadors getting involved in company marketing campaigns in the country of their accreditation – love the tabloid New Straits Times for its size and convenience; so does the golfing sensation, Vijay Singh; and so every man, according to the New Straits Times, it asked. This is taken as informed consent. If these great people desired the tabloid version the moment they held it in their hands, it is proof enough all of Malaysia do. When this experiment started in September, readers were solemnly promised a choice, only to learn that it was Hobson's: you could have the NST in any size so long as it was a tabloid. My news agent of 30 years got only the tabloid editions, though he had several, including me, who wanted the tabloid. It took him a fortnight to get the right papers. If choice was what the NST wanted, its advertisements should have reflected it. But it was tabloid it wanted all along. Now, based on what we are told is its huge success in the Klang Valley, it is going nationwide.

The NST says it had considered the tabloid format for two decades. It gave the usual corporate excuses for one. It is smaller. It can be read on the run. It would not upset others on a bus or in cramped places. It is convenient to hold, could easily slip into a briefcase. It did not explain why a newspaper folded twice into a briefcase has any advantage of one folded four times. But why is a corporate decision. Its corporate managers saw the Star and the Sun, its competitors, which did better than the NST. Voila! The NST would do better as a tabloid. Like so many corporate decisions, having decided on the size, it built up a case for it. I grant you that if the NST was a toothpaste, the switch could have worked. For it lost sight of one important fact that distinguishes newspapers from toothpaste: that the reader who buys it do not change newspapers like their toothpaste.

Why he would does not depend on size alone. In the United Kingdom, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, which improved its coverage instead, holds its own; The Times and The Independent, with their tabloids, struggle to. It is not the corporate bottom line that decides if a newspaper is read, but its contents. Newspapers that are owned by corporate and, in Malaysia, political, institutions do not have the readers in mind. All they worry is if the message is forced upon the reader in black, not red, ink. But newspapers have both a community and a public policy role: both must exist side by side if they are to be believed. They must have a clear editorial voice. They must discuss issues of the day at home and abroad. If they reflect official views it must provide an outlet for those who disagree. The contents should be different from their competitors. They must have a niche. In Malaysia, they do not: each struggles hard to be the lap dogs of the leaders of the political establishment.

The three mainstream English-language newspapers in the Klang Valley are strong on the community, but not on the communitarian, role. In the short term, this would attract advertisers and be a corporate dream – one managing director of a mainstream newspaper takes home RM6 million a year – but are not newspapers of record or substance. But in the end it would pay for shortchanging the reader. The NST and the Star have lost readers because of this. In fact, the NST is boycotted in parts of the east coast states of Pahang, Trengganu and Kelantan, and after the fallout between UMNO and its then deputy president, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, in 1998, around the country. The Star has lost readers to the Sun for its slanted coverage of MCA politics, wherein only the party president's view is important. The Sun, making no pretense of it, presents a bare-bones news coverage from Bernama, backed with solid commentaries that gives it a communitarian heft not seen in its rivals. All are now caught in a conundrum: Anwar should be banned from the newspapers, so the diktat, but he sells newspapers; it is a fact that when he is in the news, newspaper sales rise. But he is an UMNO pariah, so he must be excluded. So those who want news of him must seek elsewhere, and many do.

The NST is controlled by interests close to UMNO but its editorial direction is its president's. Its editor-in-chief is the political weather wane, whose job ends if he crosses the president's path or if the president changes. His interest is not on what the readers' want but what his political masters want. In the short time he has it, he makes cosmetic changes with highly paid help from outside, keep it humming until he hands over, by force or design, and usually at a loss. His biggest problem is declining circulation caused by its cynical political orientation. It is not a financial success as the Star, but it has greater clout for who it represents. But the readers desert it in droves. The Star, on the other hand, is successful because it strives to be a community newspaper but without a voice. It does not have an editorial, its columns, like the NST's, are irrelevant. It is strong on advertisements, weak on political coverage, and takes the tried and tested line of relying on Bernama news when there is a hint they could get in trouble with the authorities.

This is why the alternative media is so attractive to the Malaysian. There are 20 political weeklies in Malay alone. They run on shoe-string budgets, often cannot turn in a profit, some have UMNO backers who meet the losses from their pockets. Their most important asset is that they provide the communitarian views absent in the mainstream press. The best run and successful is the opposition PAS organ, Harakah, which presents an alternative political view, but this success has caused its own problems: it leaders cannot see why its coverage does not reflect their views, not realising that if they did, it would not be the political voice it is today. It is a financial success, has a clear political voice, yet it attracts a multiracial readership. Its news coverage is understandably of party and, on occasion, of opposition news and events. If the NST and the Star want to be political voices of their political masters, they should emulate the Harakah strategy, which cuts across party, racial and religious lines.

A paper's change of direction or size will not change its fortunes. More so if it forced down the throats of those who must help in its success: the readers. I have read the NST for half a century, made it the first paper I read in later years, suffered pangs of withdrawal when I could not get at it, especially when I was overseas, and stuck to it as it lost its way, ventured into UMNO politics, and changed its contents at will for no reason than a political or commercial will, ignored its readers. What it contains is no different to what the Star, the Sun and Bernama provides. I read the Bernama news hours before it appears before it appears in the morning newspapers, the Internet provides the communitarian views I miss in my morning papers, and I find I cannot even get a perspective on issues that concerns the paper's political direction. Take the recent UMNO general assembly. It was reported to mislead not inform.

I could not do without the NST. Until it decided to go tabloid, and insisted I read it instead of the tabloid I wanted. In the fortnight it took my newsagent to get me the broadsheet, I was weaned of the NST. It was no more my first newspaper. I did not read it when I returned if I left the house before the papers arrived. The tabloid NST is a traversity of what the paper once was and stood for. For a tabloid to work, its sub-editors must know that the tabloid and broadsheet requires different skills, that it is not a smaller edition of the broadsheet, that it move away from this silly view that as a national newspaper it need not identify the state where incidents happen to localise the news wherever it happens, that six different reports of snatch thieves in Kuala Lumpur does not presage a trend, nor spurious campaigns interest people in civic affairs, that pandering to the lowest common denominator is not how to attract readers.

At the same time, readers are not interested in the silly quarrels the NST has with AC Nielsen, if it has a problem with the firm, it should resolve it without appealing for public support. It is readers the NST wants to bolster its case against AC Nielsen, but why should readers be brought into the dispute if they do not get the newspaper they want? What it does not say is that they need readers to justify the higher advertising rates. If it decides to go it alone on its advertising base to be the standard it would end up losing the advertisers it now has. At the same time, newspaper sales account for a infinitisimal fraction of total revenues. This is the conundrum the corporate media must bridge: sales and readership are not important for the balance sheet, but they must be high to push up the advertising rates. But, pray, how does this affect readers?

I can of course be wrong. I have been in journalism for only four and a half decades, of which less than five years is in newspapers in Malaysia and Singapore. I could well be wrong in my assessment, although I think not. If newspapers have a clear voice, open their pages to often critical comment of their leaders, and talk with if need a stentorian voice of what ails the community, it will be respected and heard. But if it insists on falling in to pressure from politicians and advertisers, it would not. Recently, a Pakistani friend brought me one day's issue of all English language newspapers from his country he could get its hands on. I spent five days reading it, not for its news, but for the views. It covered the gamut of opinions, criticising the government and praising it in the same newspaper, challenging the government's view with trenchant staff comment which if it were in Malaysia would have cost the editor-in-chief his job. For comment like that, I have to read the alternate press in Malaysia.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com