KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 9 — Newspapers halted a collective five-year fall in circulation this year as negative perception of the Barisan Nasional (BN)-controlled press eased some three years after the ruling coalition suffered record losses in the landmark March 2008 general election.
The only exception to this was the Umno-linked New Straits Times, which saw its daily circulation fall just below 100,000 copies, according to the latest independent audit.
Circulation of most other dailies rose as a whole in the first half of the year and also when divided according to the main three languages — Malay, English and Mandarin.
“Up to 2010, we were reeling from public disenchantment with perceived pro-BN media after the political tsunami in 2008,” The Star’s executive editor Datuk Wong Sai Wan said, referring to BN’s loss of its customary two-thirds majority in Parliament and five state governments.
This comes after sales of English and Malay mainstays — The Star, New Straits Times, Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian — fell freely over the past five years.
Figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) show that during the period 2005 to 2010 The Star’s circulation dropped from 310,000 to 279,000 (-10 per cent), the New Straits Times from 139,000 to 101,500 (-27 per cent), Utusan Malaysia from 213,000 to 172,000 (-19.2 per cent) and Berita Harian from 204,000 to 150,000 (-26.5 per cent).
But except for the New Straits Times, all of them bounced back in the first six months of 2011 along with top Mandarin papers Sin Chew and China Press.
The New Straits Times, which recently saw Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s former media strategist Abdul Jalil Hamid taking charge, managed to slow its drop in sales from an average of 4,000 copies in each half of 2010 to just 2,500 copies in H1 2011.
“Many, myself included, were preaching the death of the newspaper. But that kind of talk appears to have stopped especially since the economy improved last year,” Wong told The Malaysian Insider.
The Star, which is up nearly 10,000 copies this year, has moved aggressively to brace itself from the impact of the newsreading public moving to Internet-based providers.
Its website is the highest-ranked among newspapers and it launched an app for Apple’s popular iPad tablet in January.
According to ABC, Berita Harian now sells 151,500 copies daily and Utusan Malaysia 173,500 while Sin Chew grew from 385,500 to 389,000 and China Press from 163,000 to 166,500.
Wong said, however, that “our frustration is that with next year’s general election, all that we have recovered will be lost again.”
“This is because in the public’s eye newspapers don’t just report on election issues, we are an election issue.”
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