IN a small office in Penang, where The Star was born 55 years ago today, a skeletal number of staff sat amid chunky telephones and the now archaic typewriters complete with ink ribbons and carbon copies.
There were no PCs, search engines, social media, personal devices, artificial intelligence or any trendy tool of the now to help ease the process.
Yet, for all that has changed, the most important things about a great media (only newspapers then) remains comfortably the same.
As we celebrate our 55th birthday, let’s also raise our glass to certain fundamentals about journalism that never go away.
While the tools of our trade – the note-worthy battery-operated recorder, notebook and pen – have changed and improved by leaps and bounds, our main tasks remain remarkably old-fashioned.
We still need to be there to know what really happened, talk to eyewitnesses to get the full picture on the ground, ask the difficult questions, cross-examine everything, check the story and tell it in a way that everyone gets it.
And most importantly, we still need to be credible.
Sticking to these basics, which form the foundation for everything else, should never be compromised.
A story still needs a solid introduction. Photographs, videos, graphics, data and interactive content still need to stand on their own and tell their own stories by themselves.
A media needs to have its own personality, meaning never forgetting who we are.
The Star is much bigger than our updated, bold masthead in our print products or the familiar logo on The Star Online or on our social media accounts.
You remember us when we stood up for educating our kids in Mighty Minds and Newspaper-in-Education (NIE), for moderation via Anak-Anak Malaysia, for getting youngsters to join us via BRaTs, investigating difficult issues via R.Age, for being in the collaborative forefront in the ESG realm, honouring SMEs via The Star Outstanding Business Awards (Soba) and tipping our hat to unsung heroes with The Star Golden Hearts, among many other efforts.
We adapted to current times, embraced and countered challenges throughout the years.
The advent of social media and AI forced us to reconsider how to reach our audience, making them part of our lives.
And then Covid-19 came and right behind it, the Movement Control Order.
I was genuinely worried for the first time in my life as Chief Content Officer. There was no precedent to such an event, but we learned quickly and got into position to tackle the chaos and uncertainty.
The advent of AI, of course, has changed the way we work. But we should do so with our eyes open, riding the waves but keeping our feet firmly on the surfboard.
It can help us research, translate, analyse data, even generate ideas and take some of the heavy lifting of routine tasks, but it cannot replace the thing that makes journalism what it is – the human factor.
By all means, embrace the tool but please, question it as well.
Today, we are increasingly inviting our readers to join in in pursuing the story.
Data journalism is a powerful part of what we do now. Numbers in a spreadsheet can now become compelling stories, visualisations and interactive experiences that help readers understand what is happening around them immersively.
It’s no longer a one-way street.
Our readers now take part in telling us their thoughts, vote in polls, test their knowledge with quizzes, FAQs, explore interactive graphics – just telling what they think. They are now part of the conversation.
We invite our audience to join in telling the stories still waiting to be told.
Here’s to the next 55!
