Old media blackout lights up new media readership
The Malaysian government was reported to have ordered a blackout of any news and photos in the country’s main stream media of the BERSIH rally held in Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, on Saturday, Nov 10 2007.
The rally was well publicised and with a blackout in old media, where did the curious or concerned go to get information about the protest?
They went to the blogs of Malaysians and protest participants who took photos and wrote their account of the demostration online.
They went on Technorati and searched the keyword “Bersih” and probably visited one of the 493 blogs post tagged with the keyword “Bersih”.
Jeff Ooi reported a spike of visitors to his blog, Jeffooi.com, over the weekend. From an average of 5,000 - 6,000 visitors on sleepy weekends, Jeff reported 24,600 pageviews with 21,000 unique visitors to his blog on that Saturday itself.
There was a time when the medium was only the radio, television and papers. The cost of producing anything for them was expensive and out of the reach for the common man and woman. The cost of distribution was also exorbitant.
Today, the medium is the Internet and the tool they call a blog.
Another can set up a blog and go “live” on the internet within minutes, for free.
The cost of distribution has also gone done with blog search engines such as Technorati or Google.
The cost of creating such content, also now affordable to the masses.
A mobile phone is even touted as the ultimate journalist tool and could be bought at a relative low price depending on the plans provided by the service provider. It takes photos, records audio and video, and can be uploaded to the blog in minutes.
How effective is a government ordered old media blackout today?
Ahirudin Attan, the person behind rockybru.blogspot.com and a former journalist, called the blackout a severe blow to Malaysian journalism as “people had to rely on foreign tv stations, blogs and wire news to know what happened at the rally”.
I agree with Ahirudin. I would like to see new media work hand in hand with old media, but by ordering a classical old media blackout order only pushes old fashion readers like me to the Blogs.
If old media for a certain country won’t work with the new media of same country ie. Malaysia…what will happen if the new media goes to old media from a different country?