I refer to the malaysiakini report MCA sells Nanyang stake to Sin Chew boss .

While most Chinese are crying foul over this development, I do not think it is the end of the world. Indeed, MCA has directly helped to create a brighter future for Oriental Daily .

Tiong Hiew King is a smart businessman. I am sure he has calculated all the risks before making this decision. He might be thinking of strategising and packaging all four newspapers ( Sin Chew , Nanyang , China Press , Guangming ) into one powerful media tool so that he can reduce competition, reduce costs, improve advertising revenues, creating more profit and establish a blue-sea environment for Chinese press in this country.

On the other hand, Oriental Daily will also benefit because many advertisers will want to target those readers who choose to read a non-Tiong-owned newspaper.

Out of the four Tiong-owned newspapers, I am sure only one or two can survive long enough because it is of no value now for readers to subscribe to all four since the contents will almost identical due to the definite content-sharing.

Tiong may claim that there is an intense 'professional' competition among his four newspapers but it is hard to convince the general public especially when they deal with certain hot issues which need 'consistent views' to tally with the needs of Tiong's empire.

For example, if there is another MCA vs Dong Zong (Chinese education movement) episode in the future, would Sin Chew and Nanyang take different stands in defending MCA or Dong Zong respectively?

At a more basic level, would one patronise a food court which only sold fish dishes and no other types of food? As such, I predict Tiong's media empire will shrink and collapse in five years time due to both a declining overall readership and advertising revenue among his newspapers.