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Karl Schembri
Maltastar.com, Labour’s news website which cost the party faithful more than Lm50,000 in donations, has been closed down until a new editor is found to run it.
The website has been ‘closed’ over the past weeks and internet users were met with a notice saying the site is “temporarily off-line due to major upgrades”, and that it “will be on-line again soon”.
MLP Secretary General Jason Micallef told MaltaToday it will remain offline “for some months” until it reopens under a new editor and with a new look.
“We’re planning a total revamp of the site,” Micallef said, admitting that the party was still headhunting for an editor.
Labour Leader Alfred Sant himself has been reportedly interviewing journalists from The Malta Independent in a bid to recruit a full-time editor although nobody has taken the job so far.
Since its former editor, Joseph Muscat, was elected to the European Parliament last June, Maltastar was being haphazardly updated by MLP executive committee member Alfred Grixti.
Formerly updated every evening, the website ended up carrying old news items, mostly rehashed party press releases, and stopped updating its cartoons since the June election.
“It didn’t make sense to keep running it like that,” Micallef said. “So we decided it was better to stop the service and give it an overhaul.”
Grixti, who had contributed voluntarily to the website since Muscat’s absence, said he welcomed the party’s decision.
“I didn’t make the decision, but I didn’t take it badly,” he said. “I couldn’t keep it going on my own; after a while ideas get stale. It’s better that it is closed until a decision about the full-time editor is taken.”
The internet site was launched in 2001 following Sant’s express wish to publish a newspaper in English that was pro-Labour as an answer to what the MLP holds to be a strong bias against it in the English language press.
More than Lm50,000 was raised in a telethon run by the party to add the internet to its media stable, which includes Super One TV, Super One Radio and KullHadd – the Sunday newspaper in Maltese.
Micallef says the revamped website will “spread the party’s message without being hardcore”. Content will include “left-wing opinions, investigative journalism, a good sports section, light entertainment, and a lot of culture”.
Asked whether it will retain its weekly sexy foreign celebrities feature, Micallef said it will be up to the new editor.
“It will be at his discretion whether to publish photos of nude or semi-nude women,” he said jokingly.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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