"I tell people what to do with their money"

Hot from The Poodle News: Joseph Muscat idur ma' kull rih

I think you might enjoy this interview, which was published in Malta Today on 6 January 2002.

WHAT A WEEK!

He’s the guy who put leftist ideology on the net. Ramona Depares talks to Maltastar editor Joseph Muscat.

“I am a bit of a workaholic and people can’t understand how I manage to fit everything into 24 hours. Of course I have to wake up early, at six in the morning, but I must confess that I’m not very efficient at that time of the day. But give me two hours and between eight and nine I will manage more work than I do during the rest of the day.

First thing in the morning I go to Hamrun to check out the Maltastar emails. I allocate one hour for this task. Time is a very scarce resource and so I like to budget it. I tend to get more done that way. I look at all the emails myself. I try to give a personal reply to each and every one. All my meetings are scheduled immediately after this e-mail session so that in the afternoon I can go straight to Valletta to what I call my ‘real’ job. I work as investment adviser with Crystal Finance. I basically tell people what to do with their money. It’s a fun job, although lately people are being more cautious and are scared to invest, making my job a bit more complicated. It’s due to the current financial situation world-wide I suppose. Oh well, I still enjoy it.

Then the evening comes and it’s party time. Party as in political party, I mean. We always have some meeting or other going on at the headquarters. But I do make it a point to be home by eight, especially since I got married last June. Michelle and I enjoy cooking togethe. It’s quite fun. Of course, this means that we never get to eat at a decent hour, not before ten. It can’t be very good for our digestion.

I work all week, Saturdays included. But Sundays I keep sacred, I don’t allow even the Capital P stuff to interfere with this chilling-out day. Before I got married, Sundays tended to be just like any other day but when you are living with another person you can’t be so isolated from everything. So I tried to tame my workaholic tendencies. I enjoy spending time with Michelle. I don’t even think of anything else when we’re relaxing so it’s definitely worth it!

Because of our work patterns we tend to go out on Fridays instead of Saturdays. It’s not that we want to stick to a particular routine, but Friday evenings we’re still on the go and raring to go out. Saturday we start winding down and it’s nice to stay at home, have some friends over, share a nice bottle of wine.

What is sure is that I make it a point to really dress down on the weekend. I have this theory that you can always tell what a person’s line of work is by the way he dresses over the weekend: if he’s all dressed up for a simple meal at a restaurant it must mean that he doesn’t have to put up with suits and ties during the week. On the other hand I’ve seen a very rich man wearing a track-suit in a smart restaurant. That incident must prove my theory right. I take every opportunity I can to dress casual.

Of course, Michelle has to tag all my clothes because I’m colour-blind. I cannot distinguish between certain colours. This can be quite an obstacle. I remember when I was a kid I used to cry during art lessons and no-one could understand why. I wasn’t a bad student. Then my science teacher suggested taking the colour test and we soon found out why I had not aptitude for arts!

But back to politics. I got involved in politics by mistake: my mother came from a very Nationalist family. My father’s family, on the other hand, was Labourite. But they weren’t fanatics and so I didn’t decide to get involved in the Labour Party until Alfred Sant became leader. I remember thinking that he seemed like a man who meant business and so when he said that the party would welcome anyone willing to contribute I decided to see whether it was true. I found myself doing filing at Super One, before I was suddenly asked to fill in for a newscaster who had called in sick. But I certainly had no idea that I’d end up so involved in party work.

Would I consider going out for general elections? Definitely not. You see, I have another theory that to stand for the general elections you must be either a robber, a missionary or just plain crazy. I don’t think I’m any of these. And I don’t really like the local system where you find yourself standing against candidates who have the same ideology as you do. With all its disadvantages I prefer the first-past-the-post system, the way it works in England. At least that way you are fighting against candidates who have opposing ideologies to yours. Having said that, I do admire those who have the guts to contest the elections.

Anyway, with Maltastar I have more than enough on my plate. Maltastar takes the social democratic message to a sector of society that was in some way insulated. It is a challenging job because we are not just preaching to the converted. Maltastar readers are not ones to accept a statement just because Labour said it. We target mostly 17- to 25-year-olds, Junior College and university students as well as white-collar workers. These are usually people who are in some way sympathetic to Labour but not totally committed to all party policies.

We get 17,000 unique users per day. Not hits, mind you, because when you quote the hits to a website it can mean the same person clicking onto different stories, or visiting more than once a day. By unique users we mean different people who daily visit our web-site. If we were to quote the hits it would run up to some two million, but that is trying to fool ourselves because we do not have two million readers.

At first we were slightly worried how people would react to having an internet-based newspaper. But funnily enough in Malta there are still many who don’t like to reveal their political leanings, even to their newsagent. Which of course means that Maltastar is ideal for them because they can just log onto the paper anonymously. We might know how many people visit the site daily but we never know who they are!

And people have latched onto the idea of internet. What many don’t know is that an on-line newspaper is terribly expensive. I used to think that lawyers and priests were the worst people to deal with but now I’ve added computer programmers to that list. But I must say that they do a terrific job.

I think Maltastar works because David Borg and I both did our market research. You can’t just say you’ll do a web-site and trust the rest to chance. Doing your homework is essential in any venture.”