AFTER EIGHTY YEARS, UTUSAN COLLAPSED, BUT IT WILL RISE AGAIN?

By Mansor bin Puteh

Utusan Melayu was founded in Singapore in 1939 and it collapsed in 2019, spanning many generations who had covered all of the historical events in the history of Singapore and Malaysia and doing their part in shaping the course of the history of these two countries and more so, on the mind and mentality of the Melayu then as it is today.



It’s collapse, hopefully, will not be for long or for good, and it was mostly due to negligence and complacency thinking that only their newspapers and magazines could sustain its permanence in a world where the medium was no more the print but electronic and internet.

Utusan never embraced modernism as fast as it should until modernism finally overtook their planners and daydreamers, to push the newspaper organization to extinction.

I believe it can rise and it will rise but it must be at the initiative of those from outside of the organization with new energy and goals that can take Utusan not merely a Malaysian newspaper but an international one.

Such proposition will definitely fall flat on those who still harp on the past, the colorful and joyful history of the newspaper, whose management staff and their skills were too old-fashion and rigid.

Of course, it will and it can, provided if their new owners know how to bring it back to life, by turning it not into just a newspaper company but more than that the center of the Fourth Estate of the Entire Muslim World.

Unfortunately, there is no one in Utusan and those who were there before its collapse knew how to handle the problem they themselves had created.

Some of it was due to the loss of Umno and Barisan Nasional (BN) in the last general elections which saw their circulation restricted and not sold to the ministries and other government agencies that could easily amount to some scores of thousands of copies per day.

But at the same time, their online version used to be one of the most visited sites, which also did not manage to attract advertisers so it was not an income-generating venture

This is me when I was doing internship with Utusan Malaysia during a semester break studying at ITM in 1975. I chose a Melayu daily instead of an English language one. Utusan could have become an international media center if they had asked me how...after returning from studying at Columbia University in New York City.

Utusan shut down today, 9 October, 2019, two days after my birthday, after 80 years serving the Melayu and Malaysia whose glorious history could never be erased or trampled upin. I later also chose to work with Utusan but with UtusanMelayu as a journalist for one year before going to Columbia.

It can rise again, if the new management wants to...and higher than the level it had achieved.
ONLY I KNOW HOW UTUSAN WAS ATTACKED FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE ORGANIZATION KNOWING ABOUT IT.

But before I dwell on the problems with Utusan I would like to reflect a bit on how I got to be related with the newspaper organization.

Flashback: I was in my second semester at Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) in Shahalam as it was called then, and at the end of the semester students at the School of Mass Communications were sent to go for internship training during the semester break.

That was in 1975 or forty-five years ago!

I chose to do it at Utusan instead of the other newspapers especially the New Straits Times (NST) where I was placed in the general desk to cover everything without any specialty.

But I managed to write features on my own including a story of my stay in Ubud in Bali, Indonesia where I had gone to for a holiday, and wrote about it and it got published in the weekend edition called Mingguan Malaysia.

This prompted some of my course mates then to think that I had gone to Bali during my internship training with the newspaper.

It was fun to see one’s story published or shall I say, splashed in the newspapers like that that covered such a wide space with a photo byline, on a story that not many could write on.

I also started writing on film that no one at the newspaper did and with my background as a student at ITM who was majoring in Advertising I had some advantage because of my specialty.

I left Utusan Melayu in August, 1978 because I was going to work on my master’s degree in film directing at Columbia University in New York City.

I did send some stories to Utusan when I was in New York City and one or two were published. At that time it was trite sending stories to Utusan because it was done by airmail that took a while to get to the editors, unlike today when one can send them almost in real-time and photos that are shot digitally.

For photos then, I shot them using the analogue camera I had that took a while to print because I had to expose the whole roll of negative film before sending it to the photo store to get it developed and printed.

I was however, not offered to write regularly for Utusan as a correspondent which I thought was a mistake committed by the editors because I could have used the time to send them interesting ones that cost almost nothing to them, and they were able to get exclusive stories especially of some Malaysian dignitaries who visit the city.

In fact, there were also a few other Utusan reporters who left the newspaper to continue their studies in London who Utusan, too, could ask to write from where they were on things that were interesting to their readers but this also did not happen.

I visited two of them, Chamil and Kamarulzaman who were studying in London when I stopped at London two weeks on my way to New York City.