Straits Times a-Twitter with wire stories

Poor Agence France-Presse (AFP). This is a news agency that requires client sign-in to access its news stories online. But anyone can read AFP stories online for free on the Straits Times website – even though the Singapore newspaper does not give free access to its own stories!

One has to pay to read the Straits Times' own stories. The free stuff on the Straits Times website is just a melange of wire stories, letters to the editor and blog postings by Straits Times journalists.

One can understand the Straits Times' desire to monetize its own stories.

Why should it let internet users read its stories for free when they will visit its website anyway to get what it calls "breaking news"? Stories it picks up from news agencies such as AFP and Reuters. These are published by other websites too. So the Straits Times has no reason to firewall them. Instead by letting website visitors read them for free, the Straits Times picks up internet traffic.

Now the Straits Times has also started tweeting the wire stories to attract Twitter users.

This is not what news organizations like the BBC, CNN and the New York Times do. They tweet their own stories. Even Singapore's Channel NewsAsia tweets its own stories. But the Straits Times is different.

It's good for us, of course. Now we can read all the AFP stores we want without having to pay a cent. Just subscribe to the Straits Times RSS feeds and follow the Straits Times on Twitter.