Editorial
The Macau Post Daily – Macau’s oldest English-language newspaper and one of our city’s top circulation dailies – celebrated its 18th anniversary on Saturday.
In Chinese numerology, 18 (“shi ba”) is deemed a lucky number due to the similarity of its pronunciation with “shi fa” – getting rich for sure.
Well, we haven’t got rich but we have been lucky in gaining our readers and advertisers’ trust and support since we launched our newspaper on August 27, 2004.
Trust cannot be bought, it can only be earned.
In human years, The Macau Post Daily has reached the age of majority. We have gone through both exciting and difficult years in the run-up to our 18th anniversary.
We launched The Macau Post Daily after the SARS crisis and we have been able to keep body and soul together during the COVID-19 pandemic despite a steep decline in advertising revenue.
Hope keeps us going, but hope is futile without action, while action without vision is pointless, and vision must be realistic. That’s how we have reached our 18th anniversary and plan to proceed hereafter.
Newspaper publishing is uphill work. Putting our newspaper to bed at around 3 a.m. five times a week is a long haul. It’s simultaneously exhausting and gratifying. It’s both a physical and intellectual challenge, and I am fully aware that my job entails a heavy load of responsibility vis-à-vis my team, our readers, civil society, and “the bigger picture”.
Our newspaper’s editorial guidelines do firmly support the One-China and “One Country, Two Systems” principles that are the underpinnings of the very existence of the Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR).
Our approach to reporting and editing is based on the ABC of journalism, i.e., we are striving to offer our readers accurate, balanced and concise news. Moreover, we adhere to journalism’s essential principle of attribution, i.e., making sure that our readers can know who said what, when, where, and why (journalists’ famous “Five Ws”). Besides, all news stories, commentaries and pictures published in our newspaper are credited to their writers, photographers, newswires (such as Xinhua and AFP) or other entities that generated them. We also clearly separate news and views (opinion) because I am convinced that any quality newspaper should clearly mark what is news and what is commentary. It’s a clearcut position that our readers deserve. It’s a simple matter of honesty.
I believe that for various reasons our newspaper will gain in importance in the years to come. As a Chinese city aiming to become a World Centre of Tourism and Leisure, English will be increasingly important for Macau’s development.
The local government’s decision to award local casino operators by offering them financial incentives for attracting more overseas tourists means that, quite possibly, there will be more demand for professionals proficient in English in the tourism sector.
A very practical and inexpensive way of learning English and knowing more about Macau, the Chinese nation and the rest of the world is to read our newspaper.
The government’s determination to promote economic diversification, which includes Macau’s tertiary education and R&D sectors, will also require the increased use of English, the world’s language of science and technology.
English is not an official language in Macau, and there is no need for it to gain official status. It has been Macau’s lingua franca for decades. While Chinese is, quite naturally, the native tongue of the great majority of people in Macau, Portuguese is part of Macau’s cultural heritage that needs to be protected and nurtured. Portuguese is also a useful tool in promoting relations between China and the Lusophone world via Macau. That’s a no-brainer. The three languages do not compete but complement each other as each has its specific function in Macau, which can take great pride in being one of the world’s multilingual societies (such as Luxembourg and Switzerland). The challenge is to raise the level of locals’ trilingualism which still leaves much to be desired.
Considering that many locals are not able to read news in Portuguese but in English, our newspaper is the world’s only English-language newspaper that publishes a daily page about the Portuguese-speaking countries. We have been publishing that page (currently Page 12) every day for 18 years now.
We will also continue to pay close attention to national news. Our approach to news and views about the Chinese mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong is to cover the three areas from the one-China perspective. This is crucial at a time when certain foreign governments seem to be trying to undermine the one-China principle, even though they formally signed up to it when they established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our readers and advertisers for their trust and support – that’s what has kept The Macau Post Daily team going during all the vicissitudes experienced over the past 18 years.
– Harald Brüning
