Urbanites are said to be turning to the Internet more and more these days, as signs of frustrations with the mainstream and traditional media peaked with launch of various initiatives to boycott the media. The latest was organised by a committee under the People's Parliament to boycott the media on Tuesdays. As 2007 came to an end with dramatic efforts to take people's issues to the streets, the Internet once again seemed to provide the space for alternative and real accounts of the happenings, similar to the explosion of online accounts during the 1998 reformasi. CIJ picked a few online sources to get an idea of the number of visitors to their blogs and sites during the rallies organised by BERSIH on 10 November and HINDRAF on 25 November last year.

Most website owners said during those days they recorded a high numbers of visitors. Some of the bloggers reported the number of readers to have quadrupled during these events and one even reported of having to double his website’s bandwidth to 25mbps and run two servers to manage the traffic¹. Important blogs and news websites like Merdeka Review (www.merdekareview.com) and Malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) recorded a high-rate growth in their number of readers.

Merdeka Review, a Mandarin language based news portal recorded a total of 12,502 visitors on 10 November, and a total of 10,432 visitors on 25 November. Although Merdeka Review recorded a large number of visitors during these rallies, it is still not as many when compared to Malaysiakini. Malaysiakini recorded more than 250,000 visitors viewing the reports on both HINDRAF and BERSIH rallies.² The main reason as to why Malaysiakini recorded higher statistics when compared to Merdeka Review is because, news can be read in three different languages, allowing greater number of readers to gain information.

Open source video broadcasting website, YouTube (www.youtube.com) recorded a total number of 274,470 viewers watching the HINDRAF rally report and a total of 90,310 viewers for the BERSIH rally report, which was broadcasted by the Al Jazeera news network.³ The heightened interest could have been generated by the sheer number of people who participated in the first rally and the reports of the use of water cannons and tear gas by the authorities to control the crowd as well as the massive road blocks imposed in the city, as well as the emotional appeal of the issues to many people. Apart from the minute-by-minute update on blogs, individuals were also recording interviews from the scene and uploaded as wav files and sending photos via MMS.

Although we have only looked at a selection of sites, the general mood is that people are turning to the websites to get information. In this environment, there is strong possibility that the common readers would be more interested to read what the new media has to say about the upcoming general election rather than to accept information presented by the traditional media.

CIJ will be working with Charter 2000-Aliran and a host of volunteers to monitor media coverage of this elections. For more information, look out for updates on the website.