The office is in Johor Bahru because that is where the work started: a regional daily with a new app, a proud print habit, and a Monday email full of website leftovers. The editor asked, without irony, whether anyone in the building could say how the night’s lead had been read on a phone. Nobody could, at least not in a sentence that survived conference.
We did not answer by inventing a product. We sat in the conference room, reconstructed a week, and wrote the findings in the same order as the news day. That shape — inventory, reconstruction, briefing — is still the job.
What we believe about the work
A number that cannot be spoken in conference is a number that will be ignored. Bahasa Malaysia and English editions are not a rounding error; they are two newsrooms sharing a shell. Push alerts are editorial acts, as consequential as a front-page skyline. The paywall is part of the story, not a commercial afterthought parked in another department.
We will not take a title that wants us to decorate a sales meeting. Advertising has its own counts. Ours are for the people who choose the lead, the alert, and the meter.
How we work with a newsroom
We ask for one named editor, not a committee. We prefer to see two weeks of whatever is already being exported, even if it is ugly. We keep the sample week ordinary: no awards night, no election, unless that is the week the newsroom needs explained. When we visit, we come for half a day and leave before the next conference starts, so the briefing has to stand on its own.
Malaysia, specifically
Much of the published advice about news apps assumes a single-language metro title and a wall copied from a British or American cousin. That is a poor fit for a Johor newsroom sending alerts in two languages to readers who may be on the Causeway at 7am. We write for that fact. We do not pretend a Klang Valley commute is a New York commute, and we do not flatten a Bahasa homepage into an English total.
