Behind The Malaysian Insider’s happy tombstone

A week has passed since I got the shock email from big boss, effectively telling me and my colleagues that we lost our jobs.

I, a regular journalist, will now join tens of thousands of Malaysians prowling the job market, sprucing up our resumes with make-believe tales, hoping to be rehired and defy the creepy adage that “nobody is indispensable”.

Food, sex, sleep and Netflix. That’s my four-word answer whenever friends ask me what I currently do, post-The Malaysian Insider (TMI). Of course, they ask that only because my answer to their first question, “What’s your plan?”, was a confident “Don’t know”.

Here we are, the nearly sixty of us, another batch of educated, reasonably literate and pretentiously intellectual people, now finding themselves succumbing to the four base instincts. First it was the high-flying airline workers, then came the oil and gas engineers (until recently, an euphemism for career nirvana), and now, the lowly journalists.

We are supposed to be in pain, distressed, worried, fearful at the prospect of having to be forced to cut expenses, sell off for a loss the new car delivered a week earlier, and spend time and energy sending in job applications and waiting with trepidation for the slightest hint that our austerity-driven mobile phones would finally light up the screen to give us the good news of a job interview.

On March 14, hours after the email, all of us huddled up in one edge of the office, chattering and joking, teasing and cheering at the prospect of what we all would be doing in the next few days, weeks, months. I offered to bring 10 boxes of tissues; another was more economical, offering hugs and a shoulder to cry on.

Big boss came, apologised to us again - but not feeling sorry - and told us not to be mopy. It was almost like he was about to break into a sermon entitled “Rezeki ada di mana-mana” or the unreleased poem called “God’s vast earth”.

Yet, to be telling some 60 able-bodied people who had just lost their jobs not to feel sad and still get away without a bruise, shows there is a higher being in all of us, who now live the low life fulfilling our animal needs.

So what’s with the smiling tombstone? Yes, that farewell picture which now adorns what used to be The Malaysian Insider front page?

People from far and near, many of whom are probably still in the habit of going to the TMI website (usually before or after they have scoured through Malaysiakini, leaving rantings at the end of every news page not unlike an angry dog urinating on every lamppost before crossing the road), still don’t understand the looks on our faces.

For a bunch of people staring at unemployment, we really didn’t make sense. We were happy faces. We smiled, many clowned, some unmoved by what they were just told hours earlier. Some stood erect, some on bended knees, but far from begging for mercy. None showed regret, remorse, fear, worry or anger.

Showing the finger to the authorities

And this is the reason: we went down in style, and that is because of good journalism. You know, the kind which shows the finger to the authorities, the same authorities who have not grown up since the days of Orwell’s ‘1984' or Bill Gates’ Windows 95 or someone’s 2.6.

When we smiled for the camera that day, we told ourselves this: we were not sacked for bad reporting, which failed to bring in advertising revenue, forcing a group of people to make the “business decision” of closing us down, and then burying us deep into a permanent mass grave without any prospect of a second post-mortem, together with hundreds of thousands of news and feature articles never to be seen again in their original forms.

In the days and weeks to come, life will be hard, and we know that. The fridge needs to be stocked, and what they say about bills is true: they don’t pay on their own.

The Malaysian Insider has come to an end. But the sun didn’t stop shining and the birds kept on singing. In fact, stranger things happened, such as the byline of one ‘Jahabar Sadiq’ appearing on Malaysiakini.

It might be the end of the world if we live for food and sex and sleep and Netflix. But it is not the end of the world if we live to seek God’s pleasure, to seek truth and reveal it to the world for the sake of good journalism.

While others cover the news, we must reveal it in language most polite, yet so hurtful.

Like a rubber ball pressed for so long, let’s hope this episode will catapult into an explosion of good journalism.

Goodbye, The Malaysian Insider. You gave the corrupt and powerful sleepless nights as much as you have robbed us of our sleep and weekends with families. But it was worth it. And our smiling tombstone testifies to that.

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ABDAR RAHMAN KOYA was with The Malaysian Insider and will work for good food.