Malta Today's Online Journalist in the Age of Covid-19
by Milena Niesner
The online version of Malta Today is an easy to use website, with small snapshots of different stories accompanied by images, which work together to capture their target audiences attention. Several different sections are available for visitors to look through depending on what they are interested in, and can all be accesses through a selection tab at the top of each page. The website updates each time there is a new story written, since their writers apparently are available for work 24 hours every day. This theoretically should mean readers get a lot of updates for stories they are interested in or simply should get new reading material fast.
Print vs Online and Social Media
Starting off Malta Today was (and still is) a printed news paper coming out biweekly on Wednesdays and Sundays. It established itself online in 2010 and since then has kept writing stories with the same “liberal and pro-European Union” views as the printed news paper. It also has a Facebook page which lists several different methods of contact for audience members to reach someone working for Malta Today. It also is useful to see what stories are most important according to their algorithm. According to the Facebook page Malta Today also has a digital edition of their newspaper, and encourages readers to subscribe to it for a small fee. There are several different subscription plans starting with a single time use version and ending with a year long option.
Online Blogs
The different journalists who work with write stories on a wide range of topics and also find time to run several different blogs which again attract different readers in comparison to the actual newspaper and the online news website. The news stories in and of themselves are on the shorter side with options for audience members to react to the story using a click and choose emotion system or by leaving a comment. The option of choosing an emotion to react to the story is quite novel and mirrors Facebook with their ‘reaction’ system, though it doesn’t seem to overly popular for readers to use. It does however, give audience members a new way of giving feedback to the writers and also showing their interest and investment in the story as a whole. The comment section of each news story is the same as all other online news sources, with people writing comments that then get moderated by someone working with the newspaper.
Opinions by the general public on Malta Today
Asking around it is very clear that many people have different things to say about Malta Today, some of which are positive and some of which are negative. Noel Bugeja said that Malta Today has “too much fake news and [is] also anti government.” Other comments include “It's not my favourite to be honest. I feel like Malta Today shares misinformation at times but that's with most news papers.” from Chiara Calleja who also said that she only supports Times of Malta for good reliable news. Lisa Camilleri said Times of Malta “ [sold] out to the government's propaganda. Very very disappointed. I used to look to you for news, won't make that mistake again since clearly you no longer publish news but hidden adverts.”
But others had good things to say as well such as in the case of Raymond Grech who said “[There is] some good effort put to good use! Considered long term its public presence is indispensable for democracy given restrictive competing sources.” meaning that he gets a lot of his political information regarding what is happening from the newspaper. Christian Colombo says “Thank you Malta Today for providing me with objective news (as objective as they can get in Malta) and thought provoking blog posts.”
Victoria Camilleri was more neutral on what she thinks about Malta Today saying “I don't exactly have an opinion on it, it's another news source, my first choice is Times of Malta personally and I like multiple new sources on Facebook but Times of Malta seems to be the only one showing up on my feed. I don't exactly like reading the news especially now because it puts me down so Facebook news serves as that platform to just keep me informed without delving in deep. When discussing news with others I always seem to be informed on what is being discussed so I have no problems like this.”
Overall it seems like the opinion on the news source is very split depending on multiple different things, from the political views a person might have that differs from the news website, to how well researched a story is and thereby how reliable what is being reported is. However, the news website still has plenty of good things about it, with its unique method of reader and journalist interactions at the end of each news story and the many different ways readers can find stories that they are interested in, it clearly has something that attracts an audience.