Day of the Malay newspaper is over
By uppercaise
The day of the Malay newspaper is over — but the day of the Malay-language newspaper is at hand, and it has a bright future.
So said Zam (Zainuddin A Maidin) at yesterday’s ITM forum on the future of Malay newspapers, where four news professionals confidently cut through the “doom and gloom” chatter arising from falling sales of Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian.
Zam said the two papers should recognise that they could no longer regard themselves purely as vehicles of Malay nationalism, Malay culture and Malay language.
Population changes and the increasing level of education and sophistication of the reading public combined with a range of opinions easily available online meant that the two papers were becoming merely vernacular newspapers — newspapers published in the Malay language no different from the other vernacular newspapers published in Mandarin, Tamil or Punjabi.
At the news stand: many more Malay papers on sale.
But they had failed to grasp that this change was taking place, Zam said.
Malay-language newspapers were not the sole preserve of the Malay community any more, Zam said. The Malay language was no longer the possession of the Malay community alone.
The Malay languge had truly become the national language, used at all levels of society. It was for all Malaysians and was living up to the term Bahasa Malaysia, created to herald its universal acceptance among all Malaysians, a testimony to the far-sightedness of Tengku Abdul Rahman and other Merderak era leaders such as Tun Abdul Razak and Tun Dr Ismail, said Zam.
The forum’s theme “Survival Akhbar Melayu” had set an ominous tone in seeking meaning from the steady falls in circulation of the two Umno-owned Malay heavyweight newspapers.
But panel members Azman Ujang, Chamil Wariya and Adi Satria Ahmad cut through the chatter, keeping the focus on newspapers as a business venture and criticising the over-emphasis on Malay nationalism. In the second session Zam picked up the theme with his characteristically cheerful brusqueness, energy and plain speaking bulldozing the way.
(Typically, he started off by dismissing the MC’s re-invention of “survival” in a Malayanised form pronounced as “soor-vee-vahl”. Zam would have none of that, sticking to “survival”, a word that he said even kampung people understood.)
Zam and the other two journalists on the panel, Azman Ujang and Chamil Wariya, with figures and charts in hand, pointed out that Malay-language newspapers, taken as a group, sold more copies than all the other newspapers put together.
The future of Malay-language newspapers was not in doubt, they stated. Population changes and the widespread use of Bahasa Malaysia in society meant that the future was, instead, bright.
Society needed to come to terms with the structural changes taking place, and to realise that many non-Malay people now excelled in Bahasa Malaysia and that there was a growing readership among them.
It was not just Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian whose sales were dropping, Zam pointed out. Except for Sin Chew, whose sales have been steadily rising, all other newspapers were also in the doldrums.
Read more at: http://uppercaise.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/malay-papers-future/