When I first joined GRAZIA Malaysia as a pioneering team member a little over three years ago, some well-meaning friends and acquaintances asked me the same concerned question: “Isn’t print dying?”
It’s an obvious question. Beyond brands pivoting their advertising budget over to digital and social media, older research mentioned that between 2010 and 2021, the literacy rate of Malaysia decreased by 2.74%. On a year-on-year (YoY) basis, the literacy rate decreased by 0.4% in 2021.
Encouragingly enough, the National Library recorded more than 8.2 million user visits and over 56,000 reading and literacy programmes nationwide in 2024. The Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair 2025 recorded 1.8 million visitors, with young people forming a significant share. Malaysians still turn to physical books for deeper learning and reading.
Print isn’t dying. That is especially obvious when I visited the News & Coffee pop-up at SMTH by Else and found the newsstand wiped nearly clean of its indie print books, mere days after opening. The kiosk’s Head of Operations, Anthony Baësa had barely sat down before he had to get up to bring more book stock from his room to the storefront. He looked slightly frazzled at the attention News & Coffee was getting. But it was just getting started.
For the uninitiated, News & Coffee is a Barcelona-born newsstand-meets-specialty-coffee format that first revived the humble kiosk culture of Spain. Now, it has landed in KL for its very first Southeast Asian activation. The pop-up is the result of a collaboration between Nur Habibah, the go-getter who brought this pop-up to KL, and Else KL co-founder Justin Chen. If their conversation is anything to go by, this wasn’t a calculated market-entry strategy so much as a slow-burning inevitability. Habibah traces the idea back to a very unglamorous—but relatable—moment: stuck in traffic in KL, missing the ritual she usually has in Barcelona of picking up a stack of magazines and books each week as a jolt of creative inspiration. “It was never dead,” she says of print. “It just needed a bit of resuscitation, a bit of fresh air in the way it’s presented.”
That philosophy runs through everything the kiosk stocks. Forget the idea of a newsstand as a place for yesterday’s headlines—this is a tightly curated cross-section of the world’s independent publishing scene, spanning art and design, fashion, music, sports and travel, sourced everywhere from the Melbourne Art Book Fair to under-the-radar studios in Jakarta, Hanoi, and Hong Kong. And sometimes, they even take requests from their very enthusiastic customers.
There are recipe zines bound with spiral wire and tactile paper stock—some even have vacuum-packed keropok for you to deep fry—an archive of Vietnamese war photography, football hooligan trading cards from the Premier League, and—genuinely—a book about serial killers printed entirely in pink with little hearts on the cover. “A bit of whimsy,” as Chen puts it. “And I think everyone needs a bit of whimsy.”
It’s this blend of the niche and the nostalgic, the serious and the slightly unhinged, that seems to be pulling in a crowd nobody quite predicted. Habibah admits she expected the coffee-literate KL crowd to embrace the espresso side easily enough, but what surprised the team was who showed up. Think Harley-Davidson riders. Runners and cyclists mid-route, treating the kiosk as a pit stop in the truest sense. Neighbourhood locals. Even, by her account, a handful of Gen Zs who picked up an actual newspaper and read it cover to cover. Three months’ worth of stock, ordered ahead of launch, was sold out within a week.
For Chen, the collaboration slots neatly into what Else has been quietly building since it opened its doors—a space that doesn’t want to be a traditional hotel, or a traditional café, or traditional anything. “We’ve very much been thinking of ourselves as more of a hospitality brand,” he explains, one built around the idea that people today are multi-modal, moving between interests and identities rather than settling into one. The site News & Coffee now occupies was once an old LPG storage room—freed up when the kitchen switched to direct gas, and repurposed into what Chen calls a sandbox: a white-cube space loose enough to hold whatever comes next, from art exhibitions to artist residencies to, now, a newsstand.
What’s next for News & Coffee KL is deliberately left hanging in the air. This current run is being treated as a scouting mission of sorts—an extended pop-up phase running through December, testing which neighbourhoods and demographics respond, before any decision is made about a permanent home.
Underneath the curation and the coffee, though, both Habibah and Chen circle back to the same idea: that KL’s creative community has been hungry for a space like this, and simply hadn’t been offered one yet. “Malaysians don’t give themselves enough credit,” Chen says. “There’s a lot of talent here.” Habibah, for her part, is most excited about something less tangible than any single title on the shelf—the ripple effect. “It’s small,” she says, “but then it grows and grows and grows.”
Whether or not News & Coffee finds its permanent KL address by year’s end, the appetite it’s uncovered says something bigger about the city right now: that slowness, tactility, and a well-made object still have real currency here. And that print is very much alive still.
READ MORE