He wanted to show he was generous saying that staff members were/have been/are being given shares. I can vouch here that indeed both EIC Steven Gan and Premesh at several staff meetings said all staffers would be given shares in Mkini (in lieu of taking below market salaries). But to date, I had not been informed of my share allocation.
**** Dear former colleagues -- Aini (sorry, I couldn't recall your full name!) , Ng Boon Hooi, Ajinder Kaur, Lee Kar Yean (errata: should be LEONG Kar Yean, abbreviated LKY, and you know the comparison is with the gant figure in THE LI'l Dot:) or :( --, and Kevin Tan -- can contact me via email chongyl2000@yahoo.com about your share or non-share allocations please.
Premesh again told half lies that no political parties owned shares in MKini. I know of one lawyer who did -- I'm not sure if he still holds the original shares he injected into the portal on starting up.
************************* ends YL Chong's new sharing*************
NOW, HEAR IT FROM ANOTHER VETERAN JOURNALIST!
Malaysiakini, shooting itself in the foot!
Written by Joe Fernandez
COMMENT The brickbats in the alternative media directed so far against the malaysiakini online news portal in the wake of its purported tie-up with the “neither dead nor alive” paper, the Malay Mail, is getting increasingly intense. So far, the reaction from MK has been one of mere denials and/or to imply that these critics have an axe to grind with it.
Still, having said that, it will all be over very soon for malaysiakini if it doesn’t stop in its tracks and bravely pull back from where it has been heading especially since Aug last year.
This is around the time when the online news portal decided that it must become “very selective in the kind of news stories and comment pieces” it wanted to upload. News stories, henceforth, had to contain “new and exciting elements”, instead of the “same old faces”. Comments, for another, had to “go beyond ventilating on one’s favourite topic and add to the debate on issues”.
Instead, double standards came into play.
In short, Sabah, Sarawak, Hindraf Makkal Sakthi, Jeffrey Kitingan and the 3rd Force, among others, are to be avoided like the plague. Some small amends were made late in the day when many subscribers began querying the new direction that malaysiakini was taking but it was a case of too little too late as the cancellations continued to pour in.
Non-stories continue to hog the limelight in malaysiakini, as in the dying mainstream media. We can clearly see what’s happening here. This is the kind of coverage which will not help make a difference for the better, only perhaps for the worse.
The result of malaysiakini running non-news stories helps distract the people’s attention from the more pressing issues of the day.
For others like Umno, Perkasa and the mad mullahs – throw in an unknown ustazah or two with an overheated brain -- it’s part of the divide-and-rule tactics of the powers-that-be. Such division, based on playing to the gallery, sows the seeds of racial hatred and keeps the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) perpetually in power.
We can understand the mainstream media naively playing this game because their Special Branch advisors stand behind them.
The question is why malaysiakini is following suit as well in a bid to outdo the mainstream media on such coverage? This makes it all the more difficult for them to live up to their pledge to make a difference for the better.
No one needs an alternative media which appears more and more like an online version of the mainstream media. If the idea is to rile the people in the chase for an ever greater number of hits, it’s a bad strategy.
Among non-news items, we have regular doses of poison from Perkasa and former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Whatever Mahathir and his pet poodle, Perkasa, have to say will not make it in history even as a footnote.
It beats comprehension why malaysiakini must imitate the mainstream media and adopt the position that anything from Perkasa or Mahathir must be headline news. Again, the deliberate riling of the non-Malays will not endear malaysiakini to them.
Perkasa’s Ibrahim Ali is even getting the five star treatment as the “intellectual” from whom we can only get pearls of wisdom. In any other country, he would have been flushed down the toilet by responsible media.
Perkasa and Mahathir are not about the politics of bringing everyone together as one people and one nation. They are all about what should separate us and continue to separate us.
If Perkasa and Mahathir can drive a wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims, they would have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Their next step would be to scare the Malays into circling the wagons against non-Malays and uniting under one political platform – read Umno – so that a handful of leaders can live it up like latter-day oil sheikhs at the expense of the nation. This is an old recipe very much treasured by the opportunists masquerading as politicians and using divisive issues to fuel their agenda.
It can be seen from on-going developments that behind 1Malaysia, the hidden agenda is to twist and turn every issue in Malaysia – the government’s take on Interlok being one - into a racial issue.
Distraction and disruption is part of the game to hoodwink the masses away from issues of abuse of power, exercise of absolute power and corruption.
The people are definitely not interested in the New Straits Times and the other outlets in the mainstream media like Utusan Malaysia.
Their concern is the alternative media, the new media like malaysiakini, not degenerating into an online version of the mainstream media.
The focus of malaysiakini should be brought back to the pressing issues of the day, the big ones, which will help make a difference for the better and pave the way for the agenda for change and reform.
When the last rites are being recited for malaysiakini, its ever-dwindling number of subscribers can point fingers in two directions.
Firstly, the ever increasing influx of ex-New Straits Times sub-editors who have since invaded the Editorial Department of the online news portal and successfully imposed the failed model that has since driven their previous employer to the ground. These diehard losers don’t hesitate to take a perfectly good news story and butcher it beyond recognition, thus inviting any number of lawsuits. When hauled to Court they hang their journalists out to dry.
Patently, many of the malaysiakini sub-editors are frustrated writers who can’t string even two words together to form a decent sentence. But the power that they wield is unimaginable. They can not only mutilate a piece beyond recognition, giving words meanings which were not there in the first place but try to turn someone’s else hard work into their very own piece through sheer plagiarism.
Secondly, and as a result or perhaps out of the sheer force of old habits which die hard, malaysiakini’s Subscription Department waits for the mountain to come to Mohamad.
It’s difficult to believe that the “great malaysiakini” cannot find 50,000 readers who are willing to fork out a measly RM 30 per month in subscription fees to sustain it indefinitely.
Subscriptions are not going to come in if the entire Subscription Department continues to “main wayang” in air-conditioned comfort, busy being busy. By right, they should be out in the streets, selling subscriptions to perfect strangers. The law of statistical averages holds that the more rejections one faces, the nearer one gets to one’s target.
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