World Heritage Site in Malaysia: The Role of Domestic Print Media

Cultural heritage is one of the salient components in contributing towards the development of the country's tourism sector. Although research on World Heritage Site at the international level had started in the year 1945, instead in Malaysia, it only began around the 1980s. While still being relatively new, only a few studies have been conducted on conservation in the country, especially within the world heritage sites. The current study emphasizes on the tangible heritage vis-à-vis historic buildings, and with their connecting issue on the conservation matter within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage sites in the country. This study sets out to further explore the issue of historic buildings conservation in two historical cities of Melaka and George Town through the portrayal (consisting of text and image) of domestic newspapers (in bilingual), which are The Star and Berita Harian (BH). The study employs the approaches of content analysis and visual semiotic to examine both newspapers.Overall, the findings acknowledged the importance of conservation issue and also to have a balance portrayal between the image and text.