THE premier online news portal Malaysiakini will be celebrating their 10 anniversary with a big bang on the 28th of this month with a big dinner at the Sime Darby Convention Centre in Bukit Kiara in Kuala Lumpur.

Three special classes of tickets are also available, with the platinum ones priced at RM20,000, the silver ones at RM500, and the bronze ones at RM100. They are trying to raise funds to buy their own building.

For those of you who are not savvy with Internet news, Malaysiakini is the name of the first and premier net news organisation in Malaysia. Though there are many other news portals, such as the Malaysian Insider, the Malaysian Mirror, The Chinese language Merdeka Review and the Rock News, Malaysiakini is still the most popular newspaper on the Internet.

Those of you old timers who still wallow in your fear of computer technology don’t know what you are missing on the Internet. The amount of alternative information, news, and commentaries in virtual space is mind-boggling. Much of this sea of goodies you will never gain access in the mainstream media.

One estimate put the proportion of net users under the age of 23 at a whopping 80 per cent! With the increase of number of service providers like WYMAX, the number of young people lured to hours and hours of connection to their modem will only increase, allowing them to gain access to an alternative political world of critical thinking and often dissent.

According to one study, there are now 16 million net users, with 500,000 bloggers who daily flood the net with all kinds of information and opinions. About 30 per cent of the bloggers consider themselves as social-political commentators. For many bloggers, Malaysiakini is their most reliable and authoritative source of news.

This must have been very gratifying to the two founders of Malaysiakini, their editor-in-chief Steven Gan, and their CEO Premesh Chandran, both former employees of the Sun.

They were both disillusioned with the lack of press freedom in Malaysian mainstream media, and were looking for alternative means to do journalism. While watching the Reformasi unfold at the end of the 1990s, they discovered how powerful the Internet can be in disseminating information and influencing opinions.

The idea of an Internet newspaper was a logical choice.

The capital outlay was low, since there was no printing and distribution costs to speak of.

Even with a complementary staff of editors, reporters, support staff and technicians, the maintenance cost is still very low compared to the traditional mainstream media like the Star and New Straits Time which takes many millions to set up and maintain.

In order to attract foreign investment to the Multimedia Super Corridor in Cyberjaya, the former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had promised the nation that no censorship or licensing laws will be imposed on the virtual space, thereby granting freedom of the press in the Internet.

This had given much optimism for the founders of the Malaysiakini, and they decided to launch their new net portal in late 1999, expecting to plough back their investment within two years through advertisement revenue alone.

From the very beginning, they had decided to revert back to the international standards of journalistic excellence, credibility, independence, fairness and accuracy. Malaysiakini was to be political, but non-partisan.

Over the years, Malaysiakini has always stuck to this editorial philosophy, though the freedom of expression has meant that views and news critical of government has more chance of seeing the light in Malaysiakini than in the Star or the NST, giving some people the perception that Malaysiakini is anti-government.

Sometimes, when Malaysiakini publish news and views adverse to opposition leaders in the Pakatan Rakyat coalition, they too get very nasty phone calls and notes of protests from opposition supporters.

Obviously, some opposition members and supporters expected Malaysiakini to be pro-opposition, showing that they did not understand the concept of independent journalism as well.

Steven Gan’s position of giving equal space and time for both sides of any dispute has not gone down well even with some people who claim to be fighting for democracy in Malaysia.

Malaysiakini was launched officially on November 20 1999, polling day for a general election. It soon caught public imagination with its usually professional type of reporting and commentary, and a faithful audience was slowly cultivated.

But as a media business venture aiming at self-sufficiency financially, the future of Malaysiakini was far less assured.

This was especially when it was revealed that George Soros could also be one of the contributors to Malaysiakini’s start-up funds through one of the few NGOs that helped set up Malaysiakini.

The mood in the late 1990s was very nationalistic at that time. The advertisers stayed away from Malaysiakini, and the financial future of Malaysiakini looked very much in doubt.

So Malaysiakini started out a subscription scheme, at RM10 a month and RM100 a year.

But in those early days of Malaysian Internet, everybody expected to get everything online free of charge. People did not like to pay Malaysiakini for news and views where they can get them free elsewhere online.

By February 2002, they had only 800 subscribers. In early 2003, they had only 2,000 subscribers, when they would need at least 10,000 subscribers to be self-financing.

A noble and ambitious media adventure in Malaysia looks set to be defeated by market forces.

Then something came to their rescue as a kind of blessings in disguise.

Because of a police report lodged by Umno Youth accusing Malaysiakini of sedition over a letter to the editor published earlier on, the police descended upon Malaysiakini office on January 20, 2003. Ten policemen carted off 19 computers for ‘investigation’, practically shutting down the site.

Within ten hours, Malaysiakini came on line again, using alternative servers at another location. A wave of sympathetic support poured in within Malaysia, offering loans of computers and donations in cash.

The news was immediately reported regionally and worldwide, by influential newspapers such as New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Economist.

The raid was the worst public relation disaster for the Malaysian government on the international stage. The police backed down.

If nothing else, the raid simply confirmed for Malaysians that Malaysiakini was the only bona fide independent press in Malaysia.

It earned them many more subscribers and advertisements, and in a year in recent past, they made their first profit of over a million.

By now, Malaysiakini has grown from strength to strength, and they and other Internet media players have changed entirely the way politics is played in 21st century in Malaysia,

The Malaysiakini CEO Chandran once said, “We believe Malaysia is right for a cultural change, a change in thinking. We are ready to confront issues that have hidden in the shadows, serving the status quo. We are entering a new era in nation-building.”

In retrospect, many commentators have pointed out how the alternative media was one of the many critical factors that brought about the unexpected political tsunami in the March 8 general election last year.

It was a giant hump passed by Malaysians in their change of thinking, as predicted by Chandran and his colleagues in Malaysiakini.

Therefore, Malaysiakini is a rare success story of a group of like-minded people engaged in a common project to bring progressive change to their own beloved country. It is a great act of patriotism.

So I would like to say, congratulations and thank you to Malaysiakini. Happy 10th Anniversary!

As for you old timers with technology phobia, switch on your computer and click the mouse. That mouse will not let any cat on earth to catch it!

(The writer can be reached at bapakmiki@yahoo.com)