By C C Pung
Justice of Peace
KOTA KINABALU : – An old media friend dug up this photo recently.
I don’t know how old this is or what activity it was.
I’m the only one still around.
At left is the late Mr Lai So Chon, the founding editor of the Chinese language Asia Times based in Kota Kinabalu.
He was my frequent mahjong friend. He passed quite some years ago.
In the middle is the late Mr Hii Yuk Seng who passed just last month.
Hii was for decades the chief editor of the Chinese language Overseas Chinese Daily News, a widely circulated sister paper of the Daily Express.
The two Sabah newspaper institutions are still in print today, resilient against the digital tide towards on-line newspaper and the inslaught of social media and Hii are what I’d call traditionalists, growing through the age when every character in the morning paper was meticulously picked from a bank of word blocks.
For me who knows the incredibly tedious and skillful process from writing (yes, with a pen!) To print, holding a newspaper in my hand those days was a kind of feeling felt nowhere else.
I became friends with gentlemen like Lai and Hii and many more in the Chinese media through mainly the Kota Kinabalu Journalists Association which is still around today with membership in the hundreds.
I worked in an English language newspaper.
The bridge was proximity, my Chinese ethnicity and the fact that I knew Mandarin.
Those from that era of newspaper and journalism are dinosaurs.
A romantic side of me still believes that journalism as the Fourth Estate will always be relevant.
Really?
Meanwhile, rest in peace my old friends.
