By P Gunasegaram, Founding Editor and Publisher
Dear readers,
Some of you will recall that KINIBIZ shut its doors on Feb 1, 2016 after a run of almost three years. Then a joint venture between Malaysiakini and me, the news portal was devoted mainly to business news but also included coverage of major national and international news. As its owner and publisher, I continued to maintain the website for archival purposes and the wealth of past information on many topics.
But access to the website, which was free to everyone, was gone when it was hacked over a year ago. All the information and graphics on some 50,000 articles written over its three years of operations were lost.
As we had covered some major business news, features and commentary, including being the first to write several series of articles highlighting the problems at the troubled state development company 1MDB starting from way back in March 2013, I felt that the website at least should be restored and kept going as a record which can still throw light on major issues affecting Malaysia especially.
Now with the help of our former website administrator, Aizu Ikmal Ahmad, we have restored the original website. Aizu painstakingly recovered almost all the articles from trawling the net and looking into websites that archived all material on news websites and put it back into the original format which facilitates easy search and retrieval of the substantive amount of work we at KINIBIZ had put in.
We will now periodically reload old articles from before when those issues become current. We will start with articles on and an interview with Daim Zainuddin following his arrest and charges lodged against him.
We will also run a series of articles we wrote on 1MDB following the focus on the partial pardon given to former PM Najib Razak who was found guilty on the first series of charges against him. We are also contemplating loading up some new opinion and features pieces into the site, starting with mine initially and expanding it if there is demand.
For the first time, it is possible to access all 19 issues of the printed KINIBIZ magazine in a PDF format through the revived KINIBIZ website. These fortnightly magazines covered many issues of importance in detail, and are thus a good source of reference for anyone who wants a deeper look at some of these issues.
We have also introduced and upgraded the search function. In addition to searching the website we have now enabled searching within categories, of which there are 14. The main ones are:
- Featured – important stories which were highlighted at the time they were published
- Issues – in depth look at issues which had an impact on business, the economy and politics
- Tigertalk – trenchant commentary on business, companies, the economy and others.
- Stockstalk – a look at interesting stocks from an investment point of view
- Corporate – involving mainly company news, corporate moves and deals
The other categories are Property; Enterprise; Singapore; World Biz; Finance; Opinion; Economy; Markets; and Commodities.
Probably the main area of interest for researchers and those looking for appropriate background will be the issues section which highlights many problem areas and those of interest to the public. Some of these are reflected in and amplified in the magazines.
A good starting point may be to search the site broadly for articles on a particular topic, for example 1MDB. That lists all articles on 1MDB. A more focused approach would be to search within the “Issues” category which will list out the detailed series of articles we have written on the topic. Click on “Issues” and then search within that category by using the appropriate button.
Do have a look, and happy searching and reading.