Malaysia Media Landscape Highlights 2019: Shifting towards Multilingual & Digital Content
To help businesses optimize their Malaysian communications campaigns, PR Newswire’s Malaysian Audience Development (AD) team discusses two important media trends: (1) Multilingual publications becoming more common and (2) an ongoing shift from print to digital and social media. In the second part of this article, we share additional interview insights from two senior Malaysian digital media professionals.
Going multilingual to gain readership
Malaysia is a multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multilingual melting pot of over 31 million people. Traditionally, media in Malaysia was segmented into various languages such as English, Chinese and Malay to cater to these various communities.
As stated in PR Newswire’s recently published APAC Media Survey 2019 report, content quality and readership (number of views) are the top two priorities for journalists.
We have noticed that Malaysian media are targeting more specific and valuable readership metrics, such as increasing views from an audience of working adults and more engaged readers who spend a longer average time on each article. To achieve this objective, apart from content quality, Malaysia digital media, e.g. Malaysiakini, The Malaysian Insight, are launching content in different languages.
As seen in the chart below, around 20% of Malaysian users prefer Malay and/or Chinese over English. Launching a trilingual news website will significantly expand a media’s potential audience reach. Working adults are most likely to read the news. By combining the launch of a multilingual news website with more mobile-friendly content, Malaysian media seek to enhance the specific readership metrics mentioned earlier.
For PR professionals, they may tap on the above insights by complementing their English press releases with Malay and Chinese versions. PR Newswire has been actively adding multilingual news media partners to our distribution network such as:
- Money Compass focusing on business & finance news;
- Newswav, a news aggregator;
- Borneo News, a general news media; and
- Niaga Times, a business news media.
Print to digital and social media
In terms of news consumption behavior, digital (+3% year-on-year or YoY) and social media (+5% YoY) are gaining popularity[1] as a news source at the expense of print media (-4% YoY). With 54% of respondents using WhatsApp for news, Malaysia leads the 34 countries in this Reuters survey. Readers seek more private and less confrontational spaces to read as well as express their views on news stories within trusted online communities.
At the same time, trust remains an important issue, with only 30% of Malaysian respondents have trust in news overall. Although many get their news via social media, there is greater skepticism about the news that is found there (21%).
One of the key findings from the APAC Media Survey 2019 report is that high-resolution photographs (29%) are the most preferred multimedia element in news coverage by journalists from most APAC markets, with 25% preferring video, followed by infographics (21%). As news is increasingly shared in Malaysia on private social networks such as WhatsApp, the PR Newswire team recommends businesses craft corporate content with fresh news angles accompanied by multimedia elements.
Voices from Malaysian digital media
Our team invited two Malaysian digital journalists (Clara Chooi, Managing Editor, Hybrid, an education-focused media and Aaron Kwan, co-founder, PRIMAL, a digital magazine focusing on telling stories that matter to youths and young adults) to discuss their views on how the media and PR practitioners are navigating the dynamic Malaysian media landscape.
- Commentary on Malaysian media
Clara Chooi:
Digital media is like everything else in our tech-driven world: fast-paced and always evolving. Like product cycles, the news cycle has sped up.
Unlike the days of print where we wrote for tomorrow’s edition, in the digital world, people want to know within minutes or seconds of things happening. And depending on the nature of the development, some even want to watch these developments as they occur, with live and continuous analysis helping them make sense of it all.
And that means journalists have to deliver the news immediately.
This makes it much tougher for survival for three key reasons:
- Journalists need to think on their feet. As the world progresses and education levels rise, consumers of media have become smarter, more discerning and naturally more demanding. Vapid, he-said-she-said reporting no longer works–digital journalists need to spot trends, be able to analyze them quickly and present them most engagingly to readers. News articles cannot merely be reporting what just happened–social media takes care of that–they have to provide context, ask the hard questions and offer the best possible answers.
- Digital media outlets are operating in a highly-saturated space. And shortening attention spans make the competition for eyeballs even more cutthroat. Not only are media outlets competing with social media platforms for reader attention, we’re also fighting with virtually every website there is out there. Data analytics may help us understand reader trends and appetites better than in the days of print but changing algorithms and innovations mean we need to unlearn and relearn new things every day.
- There’s a perennial tug-of-war between chasing readership metrics and fulfilling the civic mission of good journalism. In such an environment, what constitutes “value” is determined by the number of clicks an article gets, which essentially means a quiz about what type of potato you are (this is a real quiz, by the way) becomes more commercially valuable to a publisher than an investigative article about political corruption that took the journalist three months to put together. Where do you draw the line, then? For publications to survive without taking the clickbait route, they need to diversify and look for different revenue streams, which is easier said than done when the marketplace is as saturated as it’s now become.
- How do you craft a story that connects with your audience?
Aaron Kwan:
We put our best foot forward for every content or story. One which we particularly enjoy doing was standing with WWF as they endeavor to bring awareness to animals facing extinction. In conjunction with Earth Hour, a group of talented local artists re-painted the Pillars of Sabah with images of threatened animals to remind the community about their significance as well as the importance of protecting them.
To us, both the quality of visuals and content are as important when it comes to crafting a story. We believe that when everything is perfect and works well together, magic will happen.
- How can brands work with Malaysian media?
Clara Chooi:
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for PR campaigns to be specific and targeted in their outreach. Like us, PR practitioners are operating in a fast-paced digital world, where fortune favors the focused.
The best analogy I can think of is how Google’s search algorithms work–if you want your content to rank highly on Google, you can’t afford to tease or beat around the bush with your message. You need to be clear and specific, using realistic keywords and providing the right answers to the questions you want readers to ask to arrive at your page(s).
Likewise, with PR campaigns, if a campaign can articulate its message most effectively to its target audiences, it increases its chances of getting the right kind of attention from the right people.
- How can brands pitch to your media?
Clara Chooi:
My best advice is this (and it’s the same as what our team presented at PR Newswire’s Media Coffee event in Jun 2019): do what we do as journalists–step into the shoes of your audience when you’re putting a pitch together. Before crafting your message or sending your pitch across to us, research our publications to understand what works with our audiences and what will stick.
Remember that we operate in niche focus areas. Our content is specific, tailored to reach high-value audiences operating within these niche areas and it works because we apply precision-targeting to optimize our content. This simply means that every piece of content we publish is optimized digitally to reach the right persons holding the right job functions in the right industry/ies and the right geography/ies.
Therefore, if you want your brand or message to reach the same audiences that we write for, the stories you pitch to us will need to check all the necessary boxes.
Aaron Kwan:
Stand for or champion a cause. Working for your own good is fine and all but working for the good of others, that is where fulfillment lies.
About Clara
Clara Chooi is a Managing Editor at Hybrid, overseeing its education web portfolio and a global team of journalists from its Kuala Lumpur editorial headquarters. She started her journalism career in print media in 2005, writing for Malaysia’s leading English newspaper The Star, before making the jump to digital media in 2009. She worked the politics, economics and current affairs beat for over 7 years at The Malaysian Insider and The Malay Mail, splitting her time between fieldwork and extensive travel with training young journalists, as well as serving as editor at both sites before joining Hybrid in 2016.
As a journalist, editor and editorial team leader, she’s always believed that if wielded responsibly and effectively, journalism, like technology, can be a tool for positive change in a world often torn apart by racial misunderstanding and social and economic inequities.
About Aaron
Aaron Kwan currently leads a content marketing agency known as AK47™ and a digital magazine known as Primal™. As the Director at AK47™, he is responsible for AK47™’s business development and expansion across China, Hong Kong SAR, Singapore and Indonesia as well as Primal™’s recognition as a reputable media outlet in our region.
As a doctoral candidate in business, he has great interests in consumer behavior, social media management and customer retention. He has 15 years of in-depth marketing experience and working collaborations with renowned companies such as FELDA Global Venture (FGV), Greenland Malaysia – Fortune 500 Company, CapitaMalls Malaysia Trust, The Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC), Sunway Group Malaysia and OCBC Bank.
This blog post is contributed by Christine Pereira, Senior Audience Development Executive at PR Newswire. Christine joined PR Newswire four years ago and is the country lead, establishing media partnerships, organizing offline media events and interviews. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Corporate Communications from Infrastructure University Kuala Lumpur.
[1] Source: Reuters Digital News Report 2018 – Malaysia
PRNA Audience Development 