SUBANG JAYA, Sept 25 — Will the era of digitalisation spell the end of mainstream print media? Media pundits and academics today engaged in a debate where they seemed to concur but pointed out the need for media literacy among the public, especially on the importance of journalism.

Malay Mail’s editor-in-chief Datuk Wong Sai Wan said currently there is no viable economic formula on ways to pay for journalism without having to endure great losses, especially with the younger audience preferring news aggregators.

“Journalism, as in traditional media, be it TV, be it newspaper, be it radio, has always been subsiding the cost of content.

“Journalism is an expensive and addictive habit that doesn’t pay. Media is something else. Media is your entertainment. It is attention-grabbing, they are distractions.

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“Those kinds of things augur well with your age group, the advertising agencies and they are willing to pay for your short goldfish-span attention,” Wong told college students at Taylor’s University here, at the 2019 National Media Forum.

The veteran journalist said all efforts to keep the journalism industry afloat in Malaysia simply haven’t worked.

He concluded that digitalisation is the only way forward, adding that it has helped Malay Mail save cost by 60 per cent, after ending its newspaper publication last year.

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Despite that, he lamented that cost still continues to be a setback in the management of the company’s current news platform.

Astro Awani’s deputy editor-in-chief Kamarul Bahrin Haron also expressed similar views as Wong, noting, however, that media companies can still make a change by creating a better, learned society, as journalism a crucial part of a democratic nation.

“If we only look at what technology needs, if we only look at what’s popular to get more numbers on digital media, who will then think about making this life better?

“Who thinks about what’s the point of working for 48 hours in the last election, which is a historical moment by any company, globally, for Malaysia?” the senior broadcast journalist, who often hosts talk shows, asked.

University of Nottingham’s Prof Zaharom Naim, however, begged to differ, saying that the advent of technology should not be blamed for the dismal financial state of media companies that deal with journalism.

“Thirty years on, this morning, it seems to me, I have this feeling that the faith in new technology, while supposedly threatening to the press, nonetheless, technology would bring about change.

“You see, I think, we must understand the context. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, it was about control and we don’t seem to appreciate how that control has essentially screwed up the whole media system in Malaysia,” a no-holds-barred Zaharom told the audience.

Zaharom said that media companies did little to earn their readers’ trust to continue buying its publications.

“There are three aspects to all those developments. One of them is a trust issue. We talk about people not buying newspapers, because of technology.

“We must not forget that people don’t buy newspapers because they don’t believe what is said anymore. For a long time, this happened because of the credibility of those newspapers," he said, pointing to Utusan Malaysia as a “propaganda rag”, which has been used for political purposes for a prolonged period of time.

He pointed out that the loss of trust simply cannot be earned overnight, and it is something that cannot be blamed on digitalisation entirely, but the media companies themselves.

Zaharom also called for media literacy programmes to educate the masses on the role of journalism.

“Media literacy is important. Media education is important. That is the core to making people understand what the media and journalism can really play in a country like Malaysia,” he added.

The media forum today was titled ‘The 4.0 Industry: Journalism Across Various Platforms’, and organised by the Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) in collaboration with Taylor’s University.