Chelsea Justalianus Lim

From December 2019 up to February 2020, I have been interning at Malaysiakini. I can't explicitly explain my role during the internship as I was given various tasks that were unrelated to each other. I did content curation, data scraping and the best part, I searched for stories and wrote about it!

Although prominent with their political scope, it was only recently that Malaysiakini started focusing on human-interest stories, especially stories that sheds light on the everyday heroes of our ordinary Malaysian who contributes small yet meaningful effort to the society. During the course of my internship, I focused on this part of journalism.

There were many interesting stories that I found and these stories come especially at a place where it is difficult to reach, rural areas. That is also one of the biggest problems I encounter during my internship. Sometimes, the people that I want to interview with cannot be contactable due to the location they are in and these people are normally teachers who teach at rural schools. You will be surprised to know that some of the schools do not even have a landline.

Another challenge I faced is competing with other news media. Especially when a story that is worthy to be published is going viral on social media, we have to compete with other news media to publish the story first. If let's say the story has been published, the story will either spike or we would have to take a different angle for the story.

One thing I noticed is that as much as a feel-good story gives a positive feeling to the readers, it has made me noticed that there is some lacking in the system that forces these individuals to resort to these methods. Through this assignment, it definitely gave a deeper insight on the lack of resources and help from the authorities and was able to see the bigger picture on the root of the social problems existing in Malaysia.

Throughout my short journey at Malaysiakini, there is so much that I have learnt and the qualities that I have picked up: Patient, Perseverance and most importantly, Empathy.

Looking for stories worth telling is not easy. Patience is needed especially looking for stories on social media, it is like finding a needle in a haystack. Sometimes I will take more than a week just to find a very valuable story.

Perseverance because I believe without difficulties, there is no growth. Every week, I come across different challenges from the people I interact with. Every interviewee sets a different challenge. and having to navigate through the different challenges.

Through the interviews I conducted, I started believing that we should be reaching out to people because of empathy and not sympathy. By being empathetic, we are putting ourselves in their shoes. While being sympathetic, we feel sorry for their sufferings as a second person. And because of that, I believe that it is a very powerful thing if we were to understand empathy.

My advice for future graduates is that you should be exploring the working world before you graduate. As someone who has done three internships, I have heard a lot of people asking me why I keep doing internships. I simply just have not found my calling.

For the past 3 years, I have done three internships with three different sectors of the media industry. I was in broadcasting, advertising and journalism. I have always been in limbo in deciding which industry I want to end up in after graduating. It was not until Malaysiakini that I truly enjoyed what I did during my internship period and that I had a better picture of what I want to pursue when I finish my degree which will be soon!

Coming from a non-journalism background, doing an internship at Malaysiakini is pretty daunting. Yet, it is an experience that I want to have and to also make good use of the stuff that I have studied from the school. Especially with the Global Studies units that I have taken as my electives, it has helped me to be more inquisitive towards the pre-existing social issues in Malaysia and also helped in navigating through the stories that I have found and written as some of these stories point to migration, statelessness and race politics although in a much smaller scale.

To add to that, I actually do enjoy talking to people, which took me by surprise. To be able to hear their stories and learn the different narratives of Malaysian society, I consider myself lucky. However, I also understand the responsibility in carrying all this information. Needless to say, I find journalism to be a very rewarding career.