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Can the country, Southeast Asia's third-biggest economy, support two English financial dailies?

Yes, we are talking about Malaysian Reserve and The Edgedaily which shall debut next week.

At present, we have no standalone daily business paper since 2002, the year the then Business Times was folded by Dollah Kok Lanas to become a section in its sister paper, the New Straits Times (NST). Costs and dwindling circulation were cited as the driving factors for killing the paper.

May 2, Syed Mohamad Fazilla of Syed Hussain Publications, which specialises in trade magazines with the Asian Defence Journal as its flagship title, announced that Malaysian Reserve will hit the street this month with an initial circulation of 20,000 copies Monday through Friday, running between 32 and 48 pages. Cover price: RM1.50.

Yesterday, Singapore Straits Times reported that another new daily business newspaper, The Edgedaily, is expected to hit the streets from next Wednesday.

The Edgedaily will target the same audience of Malaysian Reserve, the business daily at urban centres.

However, the main factor behind The Edgedaily is to seize the initiative laid by Malaysian Reserve, reported Leslie Lopez in the Straits Times, quoting a senior financial executive close to NexNews.

Nexnews is the owner and publisher of The Edge financial weekly in Malaysia and Singapore, linked to tycoons Vincent Tan and Tong Kooi Ong who had proposed the media group private.

On the other hand, the publishers of Malaysian Reserve are said to be backed by the controlling shareholders of insurance group MAA Assurance.

Both business dailies are rolling out on the premises that Adex billing is on the rise, and that the country's stock market is bullish.

According to media reports, Malaysian Reserve is modelled after the well-established London's Financial Times, positioned as a niche product that will not carry non-business features like sports.

Not free

Ironically, NexNews is unlikely to make The Edgedaily a free-of-charge paper though the media group also owns the free-sheet tabloid theSun. It has been noted that teh Group Editor-in-Chief has kept harping that the free paper business model is the way to go for market survival in today's journalism.