MaltaToday celebrates 5 years
MaltaToday has multiplied eight-fold
“Readers appear fed up of being inflicted with press statements, a constant dose of party politics and spin doctoring. They are still interested in reading good news stories, but they want them to be well presented, articulately written and attractively illustrated. They want to read about society and about what is happening in the world around them And they cannot stand being preached to.”
So ran MaltaToday’s first editorial November 19, 1999, precisely 5 years ago .
MaltaToday was purposely launched as a Friday newspaper; it would later convert to a Sunday newspaper. It was a ploy concocted to avoid unnecessary competition from the giants published on a Sunday.
The front page of edition number one carried stories about ‘Corpses left in bed at Boffa hospital’, ‘No Air Malta flights after 10pm on New Year’s’Eve. Other stories interestingly covered the ‘9.2 million owed to MDC’, ‘Maltese will not be an official language’ and ‘We’re Arabs after all…’.
There were interviews with Joe Dimech, Jesmond Mugliet, John Lowell and footballer Joe Cilia.
The opinion pages were graced with Pierre Portelli, Miriam Dalli and MaltaToday editor then, as now, Saviour Balzan. A satirical column with the theme; ‘Where are they now’ took former Labour minister Joe Grima to task.
The 28 page newspaper also carried an colourful entertainment magazine called ‘This Week’ which has since been replaced.
Starting off with sales of less a thousand and struggling to break into the market, MaltaToday five years down the line has multiplied sales more than eight fold and is one of the leading Sunday newspapers. MaltaToday together with The Malta Business & Financial Times is owned and published by Newsworks Limited and both newspapers were one of the first to go online.