No Printing Permit

Thanks to Lee Chen Choon whom I have had the privilege of meeting when I last visited the Ernst & Young Toastmasters Club – and who’s also a Monash alumna – was kind enough to invite me to a forum enticingly titled “The taste of tweet success: harnessing the power of social media for business success”. This event was organized by Monash University Alumni Relations, in conjunction with the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute (ASLI), and indeed, it gave me some insight into the world of social media and its application to marketing and communications practice. I thought the discourse was pretty lightweight but still interesting. The two speakers were okay – decent speakers actually – Associate Professor Colin McLeod, executive director of Monash University's Australian Centre for Retail Studies and Premesh Chandran, co-founder and CEO of Malaysiakini,com. Anyway, I met interesting people like April Yim, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and Melody Song, writer with The EDGE. And surprise, surprise – two other Toastmasters besides Chen Choon.

And Malaysiakini, Malaysia's leading online news portal said Wednesday it has launched a legal challenge after authorities rejected its application for a permit to publish a newspaper. The pioneering website has over the past decade become a leading source of information in the Southeast Asian nation, where major newspapers and broadcasters are largely government-linked.

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Premesh Chandran said Malaysiakini, which has 1.8 million readers per month, wants to launch a newspaper to reach out to a wider audience. This just goes to show that traditional print media is not dead nor dying! Not yet, anyway!