Malaysian media group impressed

“We are very impressed with NMG’s move to set the trend of media,” said Wong Chun Wai, managing director and CEO of The Star’s Group, said yesterday.
He added that with the convergent newsroom is an example of how NMG had started from the ground level yet had stayed abreast with the latest in media and he hoped the Star could duplicate that.
The Star is similar to NMG except it has no TV, however, it has Internet TV, TheStarTV.com, which has been operating for six months.
“As 80 per cent of our income comes from newspapers, which is a declining business, we see Internet TV as the way forward.
“We hope our editorial departments will be converged. We do not have a convergent newsroom like NMG but we are practising it. Every morning we have a news meeting involving everybody from every segment,” he said.
A convergent newsroom is necessary in the digital media era. Journalists need to have multiple skills. It is also important in terms of reducing headcount. If everybody does their own thing, costs will go down.
“And it is also important that journalists can do news for all platforms. They will be the smarter ones.”
June Wong, chief operating officer for content development, said the strategy is very simple. The company just wants to go beyond the print business and it believes that the future is digital, which is a combination of website and video content.
“The Star TV dotcom is purely a video platform. It is very challenging and we expect to go beyond that,” she said.
The video platform is a must since audiences are younger people who want to watch rather than read.
“According to research, it is better not to copy too much TV content when going online. It is a challenge. We have good content in print but how do we tell the story online and in video form and not copy TV,” she said.
They need to learn from NMG, which has a lot of TV experience.
Desiree Gasper, a journalist for The Star, said she was deeply impressed when seeing a lot more about TV broadcasting. It is very interesting to see how NMG converged.
“We just started now doing TV on the Internet. We have so many things to learn since our background is in print media. We’re very impressed to see how NMG’s teams work together and how everything is organised. It seems very professional.”