MalaysiaKini

Malaysiakini is the first ever-online alternative news outlet in Malaysia and the most popular website in Malaysia according to Alexa.com. It is one of the most credible news sources on the Internet and covers political and daily happening in Malaysia. It was created to combat the lack of transparency and accountability of mainstream press.

Malaysiakini logo courtesy of Malaysiakini.com

Malaysiakini has a readership of 1.6 million a month based on the latest Google Analytics statistic (Malaysiakini.com, 2008). It is able to deliver breaking news immediatedly as it is an internet based and allows discussions and allows the public to send in opinions and letters (Chin, 2003).

Another reason why Malaysiakini is popular is due to the fact it reports objectively and is not linked to any political parties or is it affected by the coercive laws that undermine freedom of speech. It also has an unique integration of video, text and graphic which creates multimodality (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) and allows creative content such as these to be consumed by the public.

The design of Malaysiakini is also equally attractive as it follows the F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content. Which allows the readers to scan through the website in a speedy manner (Nielson, 2006).

the "F" shape pattern,courtesy of useit.com

References:

(2008) About Us. Malaysiakini.com, [Online] Available at: http://weblog.malaysiakini.com/?page_id=2 [accessed on 7th November 2008]

Chin, J.,Ho, K.-C., Kluver, R., & Yang, K. C. C. (2003). Asia.com: Asia encounters the Internet. London, RoutledgeCurzon.

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T (2006), Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London.

Nielson, J. (2006) F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content. [Online]. Available at: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html [Accessed on 7th november 2008]