Jahabar Sadiq
Malaysiakini
14 Mar 2016
COMMENT | The Malaysian Insider shuts down tonight. No words can adequately express the entire spectrum of feelings I have for this moment, and all the moments since late 2007 when a few of us thought of setting up a news portal.
I was in Reuters Television then, and had signed a contract to work in Jakarta as a senior producer. It would be good to look at Malaysia from afar, after having spent a decade as a television producer in Malaysia.
The job was never just about Malaysia, as it involved the region.
To cut a long story short, I came back in 2010 to run The Malaysian Insider and take care of my parents. and It has been a roller coaster ride focussed just on Malaysia.
There were no more exotic locales or tales from the wild side, I thought. This is Malaysia, easy enough to cover with predictable storylines. But Malaysia was changing and I had to keep up with the changes too.
The team changed after the 2013 elections, most had gone off to the Malay Mail Online on June 14, 2013. Guess the 14th is always a bugbear date for me personally.
I was supposed to go to but my mother’s illness kept me back from making that jump. How do you care for an ailing parent and a start-up? I didn’t know how to do either.
I stayed back. Got a new team in by June 19 and then my mother passed away June 27, 2013 – the same day Malay Mail Online went online.
My old colleagues were in competition and I raised a new group to compete head-on, apart from established sites such as Malaysiakini and Free Malaysia Today.
To cut a long story short, 2013 to 2016 has been a crazy ride even with a change of ownership for The Malaysian Insider.
We have been through a lot, even spent a night in police lock-up, and more so during our office dinners when inexplicably planes either disappear or crash.
All that are fond memories from tomorrow. We will shut down, but we will keep our stories. We will keep our friendships, we will keep whatever we have because we did well together.
I don’t know what the future holds, but I want to thank everyone here on FB who have commented, tagged me, posted something in the past and today and tomorrow, all those on Twitter and Instagram, all my colleagues past and present, for this wonderful eight over years of my life.
This last eight years is a treasure trove of memories and adventures equal to all my years in Reuters.
We won’t go gently into the night, well because news never takes a break anyway. We will stay up, one way or another, to inform you and to let you speak to everyone who wants to listen to you.
The biggest lesson I learnt is simply this, we are all The Malaysian Insider.
Thank you. See you around. Have fun. Speak up.
Good night for now, The Malaysian Insider. I’ll say hello to you again soon, am sure of that. Love you always as I do Reuters Television. Two best gigs of my life ever.
And let me write this for the last time ever.
Jahabar Sadiq runs The Malaysian Insider.