100,000 news reports and counting!
A reader recently pointed out that Malaysiakini has published over 100,000 reports. He was right. Malaysiakini passed this milestone with the article DAP minta Zahid tunggu keputusan mahkamah on March 11 - nine years and three months since its launch on Nov 20, 1999.
Indeed, it has been a long - and rewarding - journey.
Malaysiakini began with a simple idea. With the government holding a tight leash on the mainstream media but pledging not to censor the Internet, Malaysiakini set out to push the envelope of press freedom with its unique brand of independent news.
The website went live with six staff members and a bunch of volunteers to cover the 1999 general elections from a cramped, fourth-floor office lot in Section 14, Petaling Jaya.
Malaysiakini gained an audience even faster then anyone expected, registering over 100,000 daily unique visitors within nine months. Then, though, came the 'dotcom' bust in 2001 and online advertising quickly evaporated.
The online portal found itself stuck with an audience but without a viable business model. Against all sentiments, it decided to take a bet on its readers and launched a RM10-a-month subscription in early 2002.
"It was crushing. Only 1,000 of our 100,000 readers subscribed," says CEO Premesh Chandran. "We had to retrench staff, and it was very painful for all of us."
Nevertheless, as readers got used to the idea of paying for online content, the number of subscribers slowly grew. Combined with other revenues, Malaysiakini broke even in 2004.
In that year, the news website launched its Bahasa Malaysia version. This was followed by a Chinese language version a year later, and in 2006, Malaysiakini.tv went online. The next year, a Tamil version was conceived as part of a joint venture with weekly magazine Sembaruthi.
"With that, we are the only media organisation which has the capacity to deliver news in all the four major languages across various platforms," says editor-in-chief Steven Gan.
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