Someone who asks a chatbot what happened in Malaysia this morning gets a tidy paragraph, built from stories that reporters were paid to write. The page those stories sit on never opens. The ad beside them is never seen, and nobody pays for it.
That looks like the moment artificial intelligence began taking work away from journalists. The advertising had left years earlier.
Two questions follow: where the advertising went, and what is being proposed to replace it.
Where the money went
Malaysian advertising is not shrinking. MAGNA, a media forecasting firm, put total spending at RM9.54 billion in 2025, which is 6.4% more than the year before. Nearly all the growth came from social media and search.
Advertising on Malaysian websites fell by more than a third in the same year, after a similar drop in 2024. The market grew and the money moved.
Kenanga Research says the reason is targeting. Social media and search platforms can tell an advertiser exactly who saw an ad and what that person did next. A news website sells space beside a story and knows far less about who is looking at it.
Why the problem is older than AI
In May 2026 Azeem Abu Bakar, managing director of Free Malaysia Today and a board member of the national news agency Bernama, told a media forum in Kuala Lumpur that the problem started well before AI. He said social media had already taken over how news reaches people, and taken the advertising money with it. The industry thought the worst was over, he said, until AI arrived.
His answer is that news companies should stop trying to survive on advertising at all. He said the next big media company would look more like an information powerhouse.
He gave two examples. He said the Washington Post reportedly loses money, and that its owner Jeff Bezos keeps it because owning it brings access, intelligence and standing. He also said Bloomberg makes its money from financial data and analysis rather than from news.
What the government is doing
The Media Innovation Fund, announced by prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in June 2025, is worth RM30 million. Communications minister Fahmi Fadzil has described it as help for companies coping with falling advertising revenue.
The fund pays for four things: training for journalists, software and technology, equipment, and content development. By June 2026 it had handed out nearly RM25 million to 72 media companies.
Each of those helps a newsroom make what it already makes, faster or more cheaply. None of them changes what a newsroom sells.
Three ways to pay for a newsroom
Three routes are open. The fund covers the first, Azeem’s argument covers the second, and neither addresses the third.
The three routes are not exclusive and most newsrooms will try more than one.
Cutting costs is the route the fund pays for. It is not beside the point, and most of the RM30 million has already gone out. But no government can order private companies to change how they earn.
Selling intelligence is Azeem’s route. Bloomberg leases a data terminal to banks and fund managers, and that is where most of its money comes from. It pays for the newsroom.
Charging readers is the route nobody in this argument raises. Malaysiakini has charged its readers since 2002. Readers of its English and Chinese sites pay about RM60 every three months, while its Malay and Tamil sites stay free.
Nothing here says the plan is wrong. A newsroom paid for by clients can still do good work. The unanswered question is who it does that work for.
This publication is building the kind of business Azeem describes, so it is a question we will have to answer about ourselves.
The ad beside the story was never going to come back. Something else will pay for the reporting, and the only question is what. If that something turns out to be clients, the tidy paragraph will still arrive each morning. It will have been written for somebody else first.
