KUALA LUMPUR, March 23 ― News portal The Malaysian Insight (TMI) will stop publication from next week onwards due to financial reasons, its editor and chief executive Jahabar Sadiq said today.
In the note to TMI’s readers, Jahabar said the year-old news website’s publication suspension is due to its missing of a “major milestone in starting a paywall” and as page views traffic has not reached the targeted critical mass.
“Hence, we need to review our direction, news operations and commercial viability.
“The decision to suspend publication in the interim is a difficult one, but was made due to the challenging financial environment faced by The Malaysian Insight and other media outlets,” he said in the statement published on TMI this evening.
“The Malaysian Insight thanks its readers and journalists and staff working here since its inception on March 31, 2017,” he said.
The Malaysian Insight's website currently lists 58 people on its team, including Jahabar himself.
Prior to The Malaysian Insight's launch in March 2017, Jahabar was reported saying that the new portal will operate as a free site before introducing a paywall sometime down the line.
In a report by Singapore daily The Straits Times (ST), Jahabar had refused to disclose the source of TMI’s funding, only saying that it took him 10 months to convince some private equity and businessmen to provide him with a sort of loan.
He had then said the site would focus on politics, followed by civil society movements, issues of race and religion, and domestic economy.
Jahabar was previously the editor of news portal The Malaysian Insider, which started on February 25, 2008 and closed down on March 15, 2016.
Jahabar had in March 2016 said it was the site owner The Edge Media Group's decision to shut down the eight-year-old portal citing commercial reasons.
The Edge Media Group had on June 9, 2014 confirmed its acquisition of The Malaysian Insider.
The Edge Media Group's chief executive officer and publisher Ho Kay Tat said last March that the company had closed The Malaysian Insider as the latter's monthly operations cost RM500,000 and was no longer sustainable.
Prior to The Malaysian Insider's shut-down, the government had blocked access to the website which was alleged to have caused public “confusion” in an article quoting an unnamed source from a Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) advisory panel.
