KUALA LUMPUR: Petronas has been publishing its annual report for the past 18 years and it is easily available, including on its website, said its president and chief executive officer Tan Sri Mohd Hassan Marican.
“We print 5,000 copies of the report every year even though we are legally required to publish only two. We distribute the report to the Parliament library, ministries and even the media,” he said in an interview.
Replying to queries by various quarters that the national petroleum corporation’s accounts were not made public, Hassan said yesterday that this was not true and it was just that certain people “refused to look for iteven though it is easily available.”
”If they cannot find one of the 5,000 copies we’ve printed, then they should have searched our website under the heading ‘Investors Relations’ in the Corporate webpage.
Seriously. God. Who do you think you are kidding? Everyone knows that Petronas’ revenue is public. That’s how we know that the oil prices are giving you record profits!
What we fricking obviously want to know is HOW THE GOVT SPENDS the money that is taken from Petronas. It sure as hell isn’t in the annual report, or anywhere else. (BTW you can get the report here, Petronas’ site is a bitch to navigate). You would think that journalists and editors over at the People’s Paper would have thought of this, but no.
99% of anything free runs on advertising. That much is true. I don’t have anything against adverts, heck I work for an advertising company and I go early for movies to catch trailers.
But intrusive advertising only serves to turn people off, a kind of reverse branding.
Straight to the point, from the newly redesigned (i.e. more space for ads ) Star Online:
Riots in Tibet? Time for DiGi!
Sunbear dies in zoo? Time for DiGi!
Two girls die in fire? Time for DiGi!
Heck it’s even in headlines:
Yes, it’s time for DiGi!
First of all, I am intensly against textlink ads in newspapers. I thought NST’s fullpage redirect ads were bad enough, but I call it unethical when you put text ads in articles. Yes you get clicks and views, but these are more likely to be from people thinking that they link to more information. Even the bare minimum of double-underlining ad links isn’t adhered to.
The algorithm is also positively inane:
Picking up “friend” and “family” is a huge stretch by itself given how generic the terms are. More suitable would be “handphone”, “phone call”, etc. But “1″, “5″, “10″? Are you freaking serious here?!:
God the person who did this should be shot. I have to say I’m not surprised Star found such innovative way to prostitute itself even more, and again it might give nice view rates, but hey so do flyers I find stuck on my parked car that I use to wrap fish with later. Where’s the link to that boycott group on Facebook again??
[edit]And yes, I am aware of the irony that the DiGi ad is on my NN ad unit at the time of writing.. but it’s not intrusive!!
[edit2] Forgot to mention that the fact that the algorithm doesn’t check for spaces or fullstops to confirm words reminds me very much of the buttbuttination phenomenon.
Malaysiakini recently reported on a study by the Centre for Independent Journalism which analysed the election coverage by the mainstream papers:
According to the report, The Star was the most partial among English newspapers in terms of elections reporting in favour of Barisan Nasional (BN) with 63.12 percent its election reports being ‘pro-BN’.
The daily was also found to have had the smallest proportion (5.5 percent) of pro-Opposition reports, while 31.3 percent of its stories were ‘neutral’.
…
While the NST had slightly more space (5.9 percent) for pro-Opposition stories than the Star, it had only slightly more (31.31 percent) of neutral stories.
In terms of pro-BN stories, NST is up there with Star as having 60.29 percent of its stories being in favour of the ruling coalition.
…
The Sun was found to have dedicated the most space (40.87 percent) in its pages to ‘neutral stories’. Just over 16 percent of its stories, furthermore, could be described as pro-Opposition.
Pro-BN stories, however, still dominated the free newspaper with just under 43 percent.
This phenomenon has been called “shadow boxing“, e.g. the papers would print articles bashing Anwar Ibrahim over something he had said - only that since the papers had been carefully obliterating any coverage of Anwar, no one actually knew what Anwar had been talking about.
In the aftermath of the tsunami, there were many people who simply found that they did not know anything about most of the opposition MPs. This was a direct result of the newspapers abdicating their responsibility to the public.
To be fair, the coverage given to the Opposition government-in-waiting has “improved” in leaps and bounds. The Star even quickly started a daily “Know your ADUN” section. But the jury is very much out on whether this is the result of genuine soul-searching, like what Gerakan is doing; or whether this is more in line with Samy’s laughable flipflops on Hindraf.
Wong Chun Wai whined about why the MSM’s live election coverage lost out to their online competitors:
The websites of mainstream newspapers had an even tougher time, being overly cautious on accuracy, particularly on results, and not wanting to rely too much on unconfirmed news.
In the end, the alternative media scored better as it did not have to worry too much about accuracy. An example was the newsflash on the purported 14 unopened ballot boxes in Lembah Pantai, implying there would be rigging. The report turned out to be false.
A patently lame accusation, giving that the Star had been publishing full-page lies threats advertisements for BN - I would prefer a newsflash that is corrected in minutes over blatant propaganda!
His excuse makes no sense anyway - polling ballots are counted at the stations by representatives from each party, and forms are then issued. The media certainly had people at counting centers. Why would you offer “live” election coverage and then wait for official announcements anyway?
The Star also published the results of a survey commissioned by itself in collaboration with IIUM a week before the elections, claiming that newspapers were still the source of information for the public:
The newspaper is still the principal choice of media for Malaysians as their source of news and information, despite the rising popularity of Internet usage.
On the credibility of the Internet, The Star-IIUM election survey revealed that the gap is wide between those who ticked “totally disagree” and “totally agree.”
A total of 29% respondents totally disagreed about believing content on the Internet, but only 5% said they totally agreed with the notion that Internet content could be believed.
Internet penetration is also low among the 2,930 respondents, with 58% of them saying that they don’t surf the Internet at all, compared to 6% who use it daily.
On belief in Internet content, Malaysians were asked to give ratings from “totally disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” and “totally agree.”
IIUM’s Prof Datuk Dr Syed Arabi Idid said the poll results were highly revealing of the Malaysians’ distrust of the Internet, and agreed that the newspaper and television were still the main information staple of the public.
“Generally, the poll revealed that Malaysians have doubts about information published on the Internet,” he added.
In the study, 64.5 per cent of those aged from 21 to 30 years trusted blogs and online media for reliable information compared with 23.1 per cent who relied on the television and only 12.4 per cent on newspapers.
Of those between 31 and 40 years, 61.7 per cent believed that the information in the blogs and online media was true while 23.5 trusted the television and 14.8 per cent the newspapers.
One wonders how Professor Datuk Doctor Syed Arabi Idid conducts surveys with a 60% error margin.
Did the media believe their own spin? It would seem so, judging from ex-Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin’s last press conference, where he obstinately, pitifully, quotes the findings from the Star’s poll:
Scandals and scoops come and go, but at the end of the day the foundation of a paper is its credibility. Without that, a paper is nothing. When you have the trust of only 15% of your readers, it’s time for serious soul-searching. That the predicament of the MSM mirrors that of BN speaks volumes of how politicized our media is. And the solution is the same. Change!
Test yourself: You hear of a riot in Penang. Do you
Go to Malaysiakini
Go to Malaysia Today
Go to [other blog of choice]
Google it
Turn on the TV for the hourly bulletin
Buy the newspaper, or visit their website.
When you think about it, we are doing Malaysiakini, Malaysia Today, and the numerous unemployed women out there a disservice when we call the newspapers the “mainstream media”. Are they still “mainstream” when no one takes them seriously? Perhaps, like the ex-BN governments in five states, we should now call them the “alternative media”.
Linking to newspaper articles in a blog entry is very common, and encouraged - it shows you have done research.
Problem is that some newspapers and magazines “archive” their online articles. The practice varies from one publication to another. I’ve managed to find archived articles from TIME.com from all the way back in 1969 (!), for example.
For Malaysian papers, the Sun seems to keep its articles online indefinitely (at least for now). The Star archives articles after a year. The New Straits Times takes articles down after 2 months.
Just something to keep in mind. If you want to quote an article, you want to get a link from Sun if possible, otherwise the Star. For NST, after you find the article, search its headline on Google, then link the Google cache as a backup. Sure, if you’re out of your mind you’ll subscribe to the NSTP archive for RM300/year, but don’t expect your readers to do the same.
It’s very rare that I manage to score a copy of the Sun. Because it’s free, copies are usually snapped up quickly. That and the whole stigma of having front-page ads (or should I say ads as front pages?), publishing fewer pages than the norm, and being less “established”.
But hey, quality over quantity; don’t judge a book by it’s cover; youthful energy, all that sort of thing.
With the “mainstream” papers adamant on labellingbloggers as liars, it was a breath of fresh air - or maybe a warming ray of Sunshine - to read the Sun’s take:
Mohan: Sorry, Cikgu. But I can’t agree with what Azman said just now - treat all stories in the blogs and the news websites as rumours.
Zain: Why?
Mohan: Regular surfers of the Internet surely know by this time which blogs and news sites are credible and those they should avoid like the plague. They also know which Internet newspapers are professionally run and those that are merely gossip sheets. So to say that all stories from blogs and Internet newspapers are to be treated as rumours is not being very nice to those bloggers and Internet newspapers editors.
More rants on blogging later - for now, this is to compliment the Sun for their articles.
They dare to question illegal measures taken by UMNO, and you can compare their version of Tun Musa Hitam’s call to drop race quotas to bolster investment in Johor, with other sanitized versions.
In fact I nearly wrote “They are blog-like!”, but then realized it was more that some other publications don’t realize what being a newspaper means.
Unfortunately some articles are exclusive to their Web edition. Suits me fine though. I already get most of my news online anyway and only buy Star for In-Tech and Weekender.
