Unpaid wages, job cuts, shutdowns - an industry in crisis

I won’t ever forget my earliest days in journalism. I joined The Star in February 1996 and within a few weeks, the paper had officially overtaken New StraitsTimes as the top English paper, while new kids on the block The Sun was hot on the heels of the established frontrunners.

I remember in my third or fourth week in the newsroom, I stayed at work past 2am and I was the last one in the office. I strolled around taking the whole scene in. I was buzzing just to be a journalist. Those were heady days in the industry, in the economy and foolishly, I thought it would last forever.

Fast forward 23 years and things sure have changed. Both for better and for worse.

Yes, I am in a buzzing newsroom, but the vibe is different. Not just the goalposts, but the whole field of play has changed. Broadsheets, specialist magazines, the street evening edition – they all feel like part of history.

Press freedom today is amazing compared to the horrendous post-Operation Lalang blind spots that were an accepted part of the landscape in the days before portals like Malaysiakini emerged.

It’s great that a lot of people seem to care and speak boldly on issues, but this also comes with an environment that can easily be manipulated by toxic agendas. Also, technology has evolved so much that people think they can do our job easily.

“Why is this even news? Why are you always spinning? Grow a pair and expose the government! Call out the culprits!”

These are common complaints we had to endure as part of the mainstream Malaysian media. Everyone has an opinion, informed or otherwise, and after decades of being muzzled, some have gone overboard and reinvented themselves as fearsome warriors. Of the keyboard variety.

In fact, I used to ask those who bitterly condemned the mainstream media for remaining silent on some issues during Najib’s time – is there corruption, nepotism or negligence in your field?

I questioned my friend Jacqui who was bitterly angry about media silence – and considering she was in the construction industry, what do you think her answer was?

So I followed up with – are you brave enough to stand up and voice out if your boss is doing something wrong? Do you back the institutions to support you? If you don’t have such confidence, why then do you expect those in the muzzled media to be any different?

But you know what? In this new Malaysia, the crisis we are facing is actually about dollars and cents, not press freedom.

All around us, the foundations of the industry are shaking. In the past week, the inability of both Utusan Malaysia and Bernama to pay its staff has been highlighted.

In the last 12 months, the Malay Mail paper and Tamil Nesan both stopped printing. The former after 122 years, the latter after 94 years. Those were national institutions.

So many other smaller publications like The Nut Graph, Ant Daily, The Malaysian Insider, Selangor Times, The Echo – they’ve just vanished into the mists of time.

The truth is that the post GE14 environment is the ideal time for an industry shake-up, but no one wants to make the hard decisions.

Look at the Bernama cash-flow problem. You know what the truth is? The truth is that the new government inherited a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. 

A quick study indicated that they would be better off merging Bernama and RTM and trimming the fat. Thousands of jobs could be lost.

A leaner operation would doubtless be better for the taxpayer, but do you think Pakatan Harapan wants to be responsible for putting so many people out of work? Who has the guts to make such a difficult decision?

Now let’s look at Utusan – unable to pay staff salaries and without money to pay off staff who they wanted to give the voluntary separation scheme to.

There have been times when it was a joke of a paper – misused to fan the flames of racial hatred. But now that the election results have crippled the supply lines of its main owner Umno – guess who suffers?

It’s the little guy – those people who have been doing the heavy lifting all these years. They are the ones who can’t pay the bills. Not the datuk seris on top who are to blame for the rubbish the paper printed.

Some have no sympathy for those who were part of a machine that toed the line of the old regime, but to me, the media is still a fraternity. The sight of fellow workers struggling is a painful one. This is not a profession where most are rolling in cash. Too many live from paycheck to paycheck.

As a former general treasurer of the National Union of Journalists who studied the financial structures of our media companies, I can tell you that the warning signs have been there for at least a decade.

The digital revolution was coming and too many decision-makers buried their heads in the sand. Far too often, the decisions were left in the hands of those with no long term interests, and now we are paying the price.

Stories of unpaid salaries are not uncommon nowadays. Speaking to friends in the industry – many are worried. Some work at publications that are bankrolled by a single benefactor – but they can’t see a working revenue model, and the plug could be pulled at any time.

One described his paper’s financier as someone who gave the product just enough to stay alive, but not enough to grow.

There isn’t enough advertising money coming into print and online publications.

Factor in that our markets are divided into a few languages – English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil – and you can see there simply isn’t enough grain to fill the rice bowls that have come to rely on it.

---

MARTIN VENGADESAN is a member of the Malaysiakini Team.