Labouring on
An April update.
Yes, to quote my daughter, I’m labouring on Labour Day.
I ended April trying to fold some audio into the dispatches. Who would have thought it’d be an entirely different muscle: format, structure, delivery… the works.
I won’t be pursuing it for now. It’s a different ballgame and it pulls focus from the core newsletter.
Sorry, folks, not The Malaysianist ASMR sessions anytime soon.
Last week I had a chat with a friend about how some of our Southeast Asian newsletter hopefuls were doing.
There was a time when everyone thought newsletter-ing was the next big thing, hype peddled by the platforms themselves.
A bit like how Grab drivers took the bait of six-figure earnings. Or selling mala ice cream — just not my thing, really.
Sustained momentum is always hard. There are days when inspiration doesn’t come and stories are hard to suss out.
This is true for the armchair writer and equally true for the one chasing stories and rights of reply with elbow grease and legwork.
The biggest problem, of course, is earnings. That’s an evergreen tune. Nothing new.
The newsletter model is built on the idea that the writer drives the publication: it’s personality-driven.
You could say it straddles the grey area between content creation and journalism.
The operators in this space aren’t classic journalists in that sense. We’re closer to bloggers, even if we have journalism experience.
But because we publish, there’s still a need to cosplay as journalists: rights of reply and other 101s.
Increasingly more so these days as newsletters are widely read even in WhatsApp groups, to the chagrin of the author.
And naturally, what moves a publication of this sort are the journalistic elements: the news breaks, the deep dives, the analyses, the investigative pieces. Aside from the usual punting and commentary.
The good news is that despite my failed experiments and pivots, this space is still around.
I’m still standing, phew. Who knows what the future holds, life in media is never that long.
And those who cling on past their prime tend to turn out entitled, convinced of their past experiences and that their present opinions count. They don’t.
Oh, our press freedom ranking dipped seven places, from 88 to 95, according to RSF.
I don’t read too much into these things as it’s a known job hazard.
Some will frame it as a problem with the government and with censorship. Sure, it is a problem.
But for practitioners, it’s a longstanding one. If we whine about it, you can afford to not take us seriously.
This isn’t to say the media business is dangerous. You can make money playing it safe.
Some media houses are doing this.
I have worked in the industry long enough to know that such money doesn’t last forever, but it surely dulls our journalistic senses.
As always, here are the best-performing stories for April, pieces that drew around 3,000 views and converted at least 10 paying subscribers (monthly/annual/founding) each:
Anwar’s approval ratings slip. A Q&A with Merdeka Center’s Ibrahim Suffian on slipping numbers, snap-poll math, and what a Sheraton Move sequel would actually look like.
When a tycoon blunders. How a self-imposed clause turned Jeffrey Cheah’s RM11 billion IJM bid into an eleventh-hour scramble.
“Corporate mafia” saga goes to court. Victor Chin files a writ over the NexG takeover, and the police may have to answer for the AMLA freeze that moved the shares.
What Victor Chin’s suit doesn’t say. Glaring omissions in the stock market operator’s court papers, including a missing RM9.5 million and a not-so-white knight.
When the bubble bursts. Loob folds its IPO, Malaysia reboots its chip dreams on the same old playbook, and Wilmar wobbles under twin convictions.
The Securities Commission in insecure times. The regulator is feeling revenue pressure and passing it on, while drawing a narrow line around the corporate mafia mess.
How to squeeze your (banking) parent. TNG Digital is cannibalising CIMB’s margins, and Ishak Ismail’s “harmless retiree” interview falls apart on a closer read.
The Malaysianist returns tomorrow.