Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper certainly carries some weight. Just pick up the bulging Saturday edition which sometimes runs to more than 100 broadsheet pages. And one gets this humongous newspaper for less than a Singapore dollar, which is about 65 or 66 cents. Yes, it costs more than the Washington Post but much less than the New York Times, and is considered affordable in Singapore. Or it would not have a circulation of more than 385,000 copies. For an English newspaper in Asia, that’s huge.
I guess the Straits Times owner, Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), can give it at that price because it makes money from the ads. The SPH website says it has a 50 per cent share of the Singapore ad market through its various properties, which include two radio stations and several websites, newspapers and magazines, but the bulk of the ads appear in the Straits Times. It’s the ads which bulk up the Saturday Straits Times. The classifieds alone take up several pages.
Now a website has come up which wants to lure away those classifieds. Singapore now has its own version of Craigslist, launched by the government broadcaster, MediaCorp. It dominates television and radio and is now going after the classified ad market which has so far been the bread and butter of the Straits Times.
And the public reaction so far? I just checked Google News and Google Blogs and found nothing on it except a brief story in Channel NewsAsia, which is owned by MediaCorp. The news seems to have been greeted with a yawn of indifference. I will not speculate on the reason, but a nursery rhyme comes to mind:
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.
Both MediaCorp and the Straits Times report the same news. There was talk of competition when MediaCorp started a freesheet and the Straits Times owner, SPH, launched an English and a Chinese television channel in the early 2000s. But Singapore was found too small to support so many channels and after bleeding red ink SPH turned over its channels to MediaCorp in exchange for a 20 percent share of MediaCorp TV Holdings, which operates four free-to-air channels, and a 40 per cent share of the MediaCorp freesheet, Today. In effect, both companies became virtual monopolies again, MediaCorp in broadcasting and SPH in publishing.
The freesheet, Today, with a limited distribution, has not tried very hard to compete with the Straits Times. Today claims a readership of 584,000 as opposed to the Straits Times circulation of 385,000. But readership is not the same thing as circulation, according to Britain’s National Readership Survey which says:
Circulation is a known: the average number of copies of a publication sold over a period of time, independently audited and verified by ABC, the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Readership can never be known, it has to be estimated.
But now the comfortable arrangement between SPH and MediaCorp seems to be showing some wear and tear with the growing importance of the Internet. SPH has a job site. Now MediaCorp has one for classifieds. I had a look at the latter. The site, mocca.com, looks pretty basic at the moment. But it’s early days.
The Straits Times, on the other hand, has beaten off challengers in the past. Who knows what the future holds. Another deal?
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