What have I learnt today? Blogging about books, media, words, Singapore and the world today. The blog that was Blowin' in the Wind.
Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe was born on March 2, 1931, and what a gadfly he has been! One of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 70s, he blew me away when I first read him.
I couldn’t recall anyone writing like him. I must admit I liked his essays more than his novels.
He had a thing about newspapers, which comes through powerfully, vividly, here. Here’s Tom Wolfe writing about his early days as a reporter:Continue Reading
Singapore Press Holdings’ total revenues and profits have gone up, but its newspaper and magazine revenues were higher two years ago, if you check the company’s press releases, fact sheets and presentations over the years. You will find them under investor relations. Here are charts and tables based on those data showing the company’s performance since 2006.
SPH newspaper and property revenues
The internet is said to be taking its toll on newspapers, but circulation is still healthy in highly wired countries like Japan and South Korea. Tokyo seems to be the newspaper capital, boasting the two most widely circulated newspapers in the world: Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun.
Tokyo has, in all, four of the 10 most widely circulated newspapers in the world. Two are published from London: the News of the World and the Sun. One is German: the Bild. Two are in China. And the other one is the Times of India.
So why aren't any American newspapers on the top 10 list? It can't be because of the internet. The internet is as widely used in Britain, Japan and South Korea as in America.
The People's Action Party led by Lee Kuan Yew won the 1959 Singapore Legislative Assembly by a landslide, winning 43 of the 51 seats (see the Elections Department page and Wikipedia: total voters 586,098, voter turnout 527,919 or 92.9%). It faced a divided opposition. " No one doubts that the PAP stands to gain from the failure of the SPA and the Liberal Socialists to make common cause," said the Straits Times on the day of the election: May 30, 1959.
The newspaper, troubled by the "ferocity of the campaigning", lamented: "Hatred has poisoned the election air, dividing the population into embittered sections — this in an island that needs a calm and sane air in which to sort out the grave economic problems that concern all, capitalist or worker."
Only a few days earlier, on May 21, 1959, the Straits Times had criticized the PAP as "a threat to a free press".
It was responding to Mr Lee, who said at a Clifford Pier lunchtime rally that the PAP, if it won the election, would detain without trial under the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance (PPSO) "any editor, leader writer, sub-editor or reporter" who tried to "sour up or strain" relations with Kuala Lumpur. The Straits Times wrote: "Before PAP's secretary-general takes off on yet another flight of fantasy, he might ponder the unchallengeable fact that we have always called for the closest relations between the territories, long before it became politically fashionable to set off in pursuit of merger." Here is the link to the article,Thursday, May 21, 1959. P.A.P. And P.P.S.O.
You can read these articles on NewspaperSG, the Singapore National Library digital archive of Singapore newspapers published between 1831 and 2006.
The Straits Times Saturday, May 30, 1959 The Day of Decision.
I just saw this John Updike interview with Charlie Rose.
Updike recalls he grew strawberries to pay his way through college and then became a copy boy for the Reading Eagle newspaper in Pennsylvania.
The copy boy had to carry "copy" — news and stories — from the newspaper's editorial room for the printers to typeset, he recalled in an essay. It was printed in The Times when he died in January this year.
He also advises writers in this video. "Try to read", he says with a smile."It's important to know what turns you on and what has been done in a broad way so you don't go over ground that has already been more than amply covered by the classics."
Singapore's Straits Times and Hong Kong's South China Morning Post are the only English language newspapers I know that do not allow their stories to be read online for free.
Even the Financial Times allows some of its stories to be read for free.
Not the Straits Times. All you can read for free on its website are wire stories, letters to the editor, readers' comments — and, yes, its blogs. Just don't expect to see the newspaper's regular columnists there. You can read Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman for free, but you have to pay to read Andy Ho and Sumiko Tan.
It just goes to show the amazing strength of the Straits Times that, while virtually everyone else is giving away original content for free, it can still charge for what it has to offer.
Digital cheap
Newspapers can allow free online access because the digital medium is so cheap, says Chris Anderson in his book, Free. It's fascinating reading. The Wired magazine editor says why readers must pay to read his magazine but enjoy free access to the website:
"In print, I operate by the rules of scarcity, since each page is expensive and I have a limited number of them… Not only are our pages expensive, they are also unchangeable. Once the presses run, our mistakes and errors of judgment are preserved for posterity (or at least until they are recycled)…
"Online, however, pages are infinite and indefinitely changeable. It's an abundance economy and invites a totally different management approach. On our Web site we have dozens of bloggers, many of them amateurs, who write what they want, without editing…
"Standards such as accuracy and fairness apply across the board, but in print we have to get everything right before publication, at great expense, while online we can correct as we go."
The website costs only a fraction of the magazine business:
"We pay dollars to print, bind and mail a magazine to you… but just microcents to show it to you on our Web site. That's why we can treat it as free, because on a user-by-user basis, it is, in fact, too cheap to meter.
"Overall, our server and bandwidth bill amounts to several thousand dollars a month. But that's to reach millions of readers."
Newspaper publishers are beginning to ask what's the point of reaching millions of readers when advertisers are willing to pay for only a certain target audience.
Attention economy
But money alone no longer makes the world go round, as even businesses acknowledge. Why else do they make such a fuss about brand recognition?
Welcome to the attention economy. Another reason to read Free, especially if you are a blogger or interested in the media.
Anderson explains the new economy in terms any blogger or user of Facebook, Twitter or MySpace will understand:
We hear so much about the American newspaper industry's woes that this may come as a surprise. Not every American newspaper is bleeding red ink, only those facing competition, says the New York Review of Books.
So the US newspaper industry is not all that different from that in Singapore, where it is thriving, except for one thing. As Singapore's Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew said:
"Unlike some foreign newspapers, the media here in Singapore has not gone for aggressive journalism; they have not gone for aggressive campaigning. They have taken the position that they will investigate thoroughly before they publish."
Speaking at the Singapore Press Club, he said: "As long as the mainstream media reflects the reality on the ground more accurately than any other sources, you ought to be able to retain a sizeable segment of your population."
I believe the word he was looking for was "audience".
Semantics aside, his statement begs the question, is it quality or monopoly that has kept the Singapore newspapers so profitable?
Singapore Press Holdings, which reported a net profit of 127 million Singapore dollars ($89.3 million) in the third quarter ended on May 31, either wholly or partly owns all the major local newspapers.
I just had a look at a Straits Times weekend article after reading about it now on The Online Citizen (Moderating the internet – let’s hold the horses ). Of course, bloggers should exercise restraint for their own good. How many want trouble at work or school or with the authorities for that matter?
But the problem is not so much with the blogs I read as with the Straits Times itself. It’s the Singapore newspaper’s rah-rah cheerleading that induces netizens to say that’s not all there is to the story.
Take, for example, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s speech to employers and unionists at the Singapore Tripartism Forum. The Straits Times website came out with its usual rah-rah about Our not-so-secret weapon — about how a Latin American leader was astounded when he heard that Singapore’s labour chief Lim Swee Say is also a government minister. ““He looked at Swee Say, and looked at me. He said: ‘Is that really true?’ He could not imagine it,’” said Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, reported the Straits Times.
That made me wonder how a Latin American leader of all people could be surprised at a labour leader being a government minister.
Doesn’t the Latin American leader know the backgrounds of the leaders of his own region?, I asked in my previous post, An easily surprised Latin American leader.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is a former union leader. And so is Bolivia’s President Evo Morales.
I was so surprised that the Straits Times covered the prime minister’s speech from that angle that I actually bought the newspaper today. It carried the same story with virtually the same headline, Tripartism, Singapore’s not-so-secret weapon.
Why rah-rah ain’t all right
That might have been all right 10 years ago. But now we have the internet and a multitude of news sources, plenty of which are credible. One can easily cross-check a Straits Times report with what others are saying.
Singapore’s tech-savvy prime minister – who graduated with a first in mathematics from Cambridge and has a diploma in computer science – knows that.
What the report should have said
In fact, he had a great deal more to say in his speech. Brace for tough times: PM, says the headline on the Today website. He gave a sober thoughtful speech where he candidly spoke of the problems facing Singapore. “Over the next four to five years, if we can get 2 or 3 per cent growth, I think that’s not bad, 3 or 4 per cent growth, I would say we’re lucky,” he said. He also spoke of Singapore’s strengths and the measures the government is taking to tackle the downturn.
Why didn’t the Straits Times go with that instead of highlighting a Latin American leader’s surprise at a union leader being a government minister?
Breaking news from Singapore's Straits Times newspaper website.
Singapore newspapers continue to report rising readership and increasing circulation. So Rupert Murdoch may have nothing new to say to them. But anyone interested in the media and the internet may be fascinated by Murdoch’s speech on “The future of newspapers: Moving beyond dead trees”. Murdoch says:
I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone. But our real business isn't printing on dead trees. It's giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.
It's true that in the coming decades, the printed versions of some newspapers will lose circulation. But if papers provide readers with news they can trust, we'll see gains in circulation—on our web pages, through our RSS feeds, in emails delivering customised news and advertising, to mobile phones.
In short, we are moving from news papers to news brands…
My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers.
It’s a fascinating speech, a history of the media by the world’s top media magnate from the time he started in the business in the 1950s. He recalls how he was called home from Oxford when his father died and he became a newspaper proprietor, owner of the Adelaide News, at the age of 22. The garage attendant at the newspaper office didn’t recognise him and said, “Hey, sonny, you can't park here.”
Here’s the complete transcript of the speech. It’s the third in the series of the Boyer Lectures that Murdoch is giving every Sunday on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The audio is also available for downloading here.
Transcript
Rupert Murdoch: Today I would like to talk with you about a subject that always gets certain journalists going: the future of newspapers, and it's a subject that has a relevance far beyond the feverish, sometimes insecure collection of egos and energy that is the journalistic profession.
Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise. I know industries that are today facing stiff new competition from the internet: banks, retailers, phone companies, and so on. But these sectors also see the internet as an extraordinary opportunity. But among our journalistic friends are some misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity.
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