Malaysiakini went live nine days before the last general election - Nov 20, 1999 to be exact. It wasn't really our decision to launch on that day. We were far from ready to cover the news that matters.

The man responsible for our premature launch was none other than Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The wily leader had unexpectedly called a snap election when most of us thought it would be held in early 2000.

With the preparation for our launch slashed from months to, yes, 11 days, we scrambled to clobber together a team of three young and relatively inexperienced journalists. None of the mainstream journalists we approached were willing to 'defect' - the pay was too low, the risk too high.

We enlisted a self-taught 19-year-old web designer to help us put together a no-frills site. Malaysiakini , operating from a rented office in Petaling Jaya's Section 14, went live on nomination day.

The result of our maiden foray as cyber guerillas was nothing to shout about - we posted two news reports and a letter.

Three days later, however, we stumbled on our first major scoop - Chinese daily Sin Chew Jit Poh ran a photo of Barisan Nasional leaders where fallen-from-grace ex-deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim was airbrushed, Stalinist-style, out of the picture. The daily's editor-in-chief subsequently apologised for the faux pas.

On the night of polling day, we were the first to announce that PAS had taken Terengganu, and the first to report the defeat of key Umno ministers and two DAP heavyweights - Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh.

Four years later, we are again preparing for another general election.

Game over?

When we embarked on the malaysiakini project, few people, least of all ourselves, believed that we would be around and kicking today.

Indeed, there were times when we thought the game was over.

We lost count of the number of times malaysiakini was hacked. There were other forms of attacks too - for example, our purportedly link to infamous currency speculator George Soros. Pressures were also directed at our advertisers.

We faced government bans on covering key functions, and at times our journalists were unceremoniously escorted out of press conferences. More recently, our office was raided by the police with 19 computers confiscated.

There were accolades too. We bagged a number of international awards . Malaysiakini now serves as a major forum for debate on burning issues. We have our fair share of scoops.

And there were surprises as well - our readership is not the computer savvy 20-something crowd that we had targeted. Most are information-hungry professionals above 35.

But when all is said and done, independent media can only survive if it is financially independent.

Last year, malaysiakini made the painful decision to be a paid subscription website - the first and only such venture in the country.

Believe me, it wasn't easy. Not only did we have to develop the technology to handle subscription, we also needed to devise a payment system simple enough for our readers to subscribe.

Battle on two fronts

Not unexpectedly, our readership fell from a high of 120,000 to 50,000, and that on good days.

Clearly, Malaysiakini has to battle on two fronts - to convince Malaysians to pay for Internet content and to get them to subscribe to the website.

Still, the site struggles to pay for itself. The good news is that we are able to meet whatever shortfall in our budget through donations, and we have been breaking even every year.

Partly, this is because we are a small outfit, with half a dozen of lowly-paid journalists at work seven days a week.

When we opted for subscription, I had said : "Given the choice - between producing a print publication and an online publication - we'll do print anytime. The reason is simple: print publications sell, online publications don't."

Which is why we have sent an application to the government for a publication licence in September last year. So far, there has been no word from the Home Ministry. Then again, we had not expected our application to be approved when Mahathir was in power.

Now that he is gone, and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is in charge, it is time malaysiakini be given a licence for a print weekly. After all, Pak Lah has urged Malaysians to tell him the truth.

And that was exactly what we intended to do when we went live four years ago.