THE New Sabah Times, the storied Sabah daily whence the state's first chief minister, the late Tun Fuad Stephens, rose to political prominence, is no more. It ceased publication on the last day of 2020, citing a precipitous drop in readership circulation and advertising revenue. This sad tale has become increasingly a familiar one.
It is not the first mass-circulation daily newspaper in Malaysia to have folded and neither will it likely be the last. Journalism in print form seems to be in an existential crisis, not just in this country, but globally.
Despite most still existing newspapers making the conscious decision to migrate to digital editions (some becoming available exclusively online), it has become clearer by the day that the news business, in print form most especially, is in long-term recession.
If, as most people living in democratic countries think so, the so-called Fourth Estate is regarded as one of the vital pillars of healthy public discourse required of any vibrant democracy, then the implications of its recession are dire indeed. Can anything be done to arrest this alarming decline?
We must, of course, start by delving into the causes of the newspaper fading into feared long-term extinction. The most proximate cause is probably that our hectic modern lifestyle has led to individuals with very short attention spans. This, in turn, exacerbates the downward trend in the reading habit.
If growing numbers, especially among our young, are allergic to books, they are likewise finding wordy news articles and analyses found in newspapers hard to swallow.
The public space has, for quite some time now, been inundated by mere soundbites over the radio or television and, more recently, by short messages going viral over social media.
Social media behemoths, such as Facebook and Google, have tapped massively into these social trends by becoming so-called news aggregators, not so much producing their own news content as poaching morsels of news from established news providers, such as traditional newspapers.
As eyeballs shift en masse to such social media outfits, so follow the advertisers, leaving newspapers blindsided from their bread-and-butter twins: circulation and advertising.
Such competition has come fast and furious. One must also ask if it is even fair competition. It costs almost next to nothing to be news aggregators in social media and yet they are the ones reaping the lion's share of advertising revenue now.
Meanwhile, are newspapers increasingly expected to be providing a supposedly vital democratic function for nothing? Who is going to pay for all the reporters out collecting and writing news stories and the news editors turning those news stories into publicly digestible print copy?
The Western world — and increasingly much of the rest of the world as well — has now come around to the realisation that social media giants, if left unchecked, may in time work against the very foundations upon which democratic societies are based.
The deleterious effects and fearsome power of social media have been brought into sharp relief by the political phenomenon that is United States President Donald Trump.
He has made it a habit to disseminate plainly false or so-called alternative facts and attempt to turn conspiracy theories respectable among his legion of adoring and unquestioning supporters via something as humble as his personal Twitter account.
It points to the ominously dangerous possibilities if unfiltered social media become widely abused, even by political leaders.
Quite how social media can be brought to heel is still being extensively debated. It is a debate that is both timely and essential. Are they to be strictly little more than a modern tool of communication or should they become part and parcel of the Fourth Estate, even replacing traditional media such as newspapers altogether over time?
These are all tough questions that demand urgent answers. Ultimately, such answers may decide if newspapers as we know them today really have any long-term future.
The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak