By Debra Chong
PORT KLANG, May 24 — Father Lawrence Andrew looks excited. His warm smile stretches ear to ear, as he gets ready to talk about his pet project.
The editor-priest of Malaysia’s only Catholic newspaper had taken a huge risk and it had paid off.
Four years after putting The Herald on the World Wide Web, he finally decided the time was ripe to actively set up a proper online edition of the weekly.
The brand new website (www.heraldmalaysia.com) is neater to navigate, offers fresh news and views on religions around the world and even has interactive activities from young children (a digital colouring page) and links for youths to talk straight to the pope on Facebook.
Best of all, it is free. In the past, Web readers were charged RM60 a year.
In just a month, he saw the figures jump to almost 16,000 visits from over 100 countries. Of these, half are from the United States. About three out of five people in total are new visitors.
Father Lawrence is pleased with the numbers. He is encouraged that a little known newspaper has gained such a following in such a short time after its massive makeover in India.
“We have to go into the digital world without any hesitation,” he told The Malaysian Insider yesterday, taking a break from preparing today’s official launch of the revamped website.
In the past, he had hired a local company to maintain the website. But he had to take on a lot of the grunt work himself. None of the ethnic-Chinese staff were Catholic.
And as the head priest for the St Anne’s Church here, he had other duties to take care of. He also had to lay the pages for the paper every week. His editorial staff numbered two helpers.
The US$800 (RM2,880) a month deal he pays to the India-based company to design the website and update the content daily suddenly seemed very worth it.
It is a very different view from the one he had four years ago, or even two weeks ago when he boarded the plane for Kerala, his first face-to-face meeting with the people who had been working on The Herald Online website.
After a bad digital experience in the past, he was blown away by the professionalism shown by Tranz Media.
He heard they had set up a similar website for the Catholic Bishops Conference in India previously. That was how he got in touch with the crew, headed by Kerala bureau boss George Iype, a Catholic himself.
Iype’s faith assured Father Lawrence that religious sensitivities would be handled with extreme care.
But the priest was especially taken to learn the team is multireligious and had no qualms working on a Catholic project.
“The content guy, Ziad is a Muslim. The web designer, Anand, is Hindu,” Father Lawrence said, his eyes twinkling. But the unspoken question hung heavy in the air: could such a relationship work out harmoniously in multireligious Malaysia?
After all, one of the main reasons that drove Father Lawrence to get help abroad was not the lack of local talent but the fear of a sudden clampdown from the state.
“One of my concerns came from looking at RPK,” he said, referring to the popular editor of the Malaysia-Today news site now on the run from the law.
Raja Petra Kamarudin had been hauled up several times by the police for posting allegedly seditious stories. Access to his main website was also blocked by the state, though they failed to stop mirror sites from popping up later.
Father Lawrence feels a semblance of security in having his website hosted outside the country.
He also sees it as a way to get around Malaysia’s restrictive publishing policies, having suffered much grief from the previous administration under Tun Abdullah Badawi.
For Father Lawrence, going online is a good way to reach out to a wider audience. He notes the overwhelming amount of misinformation out there about the Catholic church.
The Catholic church is suing the government for stopping it using the word “Allah” to mean God. The home ministry, which gives out the annual printing permit for local media, insists the word is for Muslims only.
The print edition of The Herald may have spiked from some 11,000 readers 1½ years ago to the latest 14,000 people who gladly fork over the nominal fee of RM1 every week.
No doubt, the growing sales is boosted by the spotlight on the controversial “Allah” lawsuit, which will be brought back in the Kuala Lumpur high court on Thursday.
Does he fear a backlash?
“I don't think so. Malaysia is committed to the World Wide Web. It’s a borderless world,” he pointed out.
“As such, you can’t restrict,” he insists.
“We’re not only being a source of news to Malaysian Catholics inside the country, but as you can see from the statistics, we’re also reaching out to people from the wider world,” he said.
“It will be very bad if they try to restrain,” he added. For now, the waters between church and state seem calm.
But as editor of the church’s news organ, he feels a duty to step up to the plate and sort out the truth from the half-truths and outright lies in order to better guide the next generation of Catholics.
He stresses it is an attempt to live up to Pope Benedict XVI’s latest call in celebrating World Communications Sunday today — to use new technologies to “connect” people of different religions.
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parishioner from Kristus Aman Chapel, TTDI