Yawning Bread. June 2006

Stomping its way to.... where?

    

  

 
"You can quote me," she said, "but don't mention my name." 

That being the case, I don't know whether I am now quoting her or not. In that twilight zone of a nameless quote, she said, "I'm quite annoyed  to see the Straits Times set up Stomp." It seemed to her yet another attempt by the government-controlled media to monopolise the media landscape.

What is Stomp? It is a web portal like countless others. Its subsections include bulletin boards, photos (hotbods, fashion, etc), restaurant guides, agony aunts.... strangely, no movie reviews.

It has 7 celebrity bloggers who are given a topic a week to write on, and who also host online chats once a week. The site also caters to people sending in videoclips of newsworthy events around Singapore, like a truck catching fire. I think this is expected to be the main growth area for "news". 

Explaining the rationale behind Stomp,

STOMP is one way the newspaper is responding to changing readership trends, says Straits Times editor Han Fook Kwang, 53.

Noting that print media worldwide are losing readers to new, upstart media like the Internet, he says 'We realised that we needed to go beyond print and embrace new media to be relevant to younger readers.'

-- Straits Times Life!, 17 June 2006

The set-up cost for Stomp was reported to be nearly S$2 million. It was in gestation for about a year prior to its launch on 14 June 2006. At its launch, prizes were given away, to the tune of S$75,557 in order to attract immediate eyeballs.

Unlike the un-named woman who was upset about this new venture, I am quite unmoved by it. It is a fact that old-fashioned print media is steadily losing ground to electronic media, and it is only to be expected that newspaper companies would try to do something about the trend. As a business, they have to seize opportunities in emerging industries.

Yet, while I can appreciate the problem, it mystifies me why they think Stomp is the solution.

 
The mysteries

First of all, can a portal be commercialised in a way that can recover the S$2 million set-up cost and its future running costs? From the look of the site, it appears intended to be advertising-supported. Is this a viable business model? Even for big markets such as the US, it's still touch-and-go. What more of a small market like Singapore?

Secondly, what is it that Straits Times brings to the portal business that some other media company, even outside Singapore, cannot? All it takes is for a deep-pocketed company, anywhere, to be interested in the Singapore market. Hire software people, web designers, a server facility, a few celebrity bloggers, agony aunts and food critics, but not forgetting a launch marketing campaign, and voilà, another portal aimed at the Singapore market is off the ground.

What comparative advantage does Stomp and the Straits Times have? I honestly can't think of any. Yes, they may have deeper pockets than any other media company in Singapore but their pockets aren't deeper than, say, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. Let's not forget that with the internet, national boundaries are no barrier at all.

The hope may be that Stomp acquires first-mover advantage, and Singaporeans get habituated to Stomp before competition moves in, but will the Straits Times, subject to the censorship policies of the Singapore government, be able to hold its own against competitors who don't have such constraints, even if these competitors should come later?

Thirdly, and most mysterious of all, is how Stomp, as a sub-brand of the Straits Times, can be expected to reverse the fortunes of the newspaper. Here, I'm not referring to "newspaper" as a physical, paper-based object, but to a certain compilation of news and information, whatever the medium by which it is delivered to its readers.

Frankly, I just don't see how, whatever loyal customers Stomp develops, these customers will ever migrate to the Straits Times. The problem lies in the huge gap between what Stompers are likely to want and what the Straits Times is supposed to be.

So if Stomp by itself is a doubtful proposition commercially, and yet does not boost the paying readership of the Straits Times, then what purpose does it serve?

It's like this: the Straits Times is really an agglomeration of content; its delivery mode can vary. The problem that the Straits Times faces is that competition in content is growing, and worse, that more and more of its customers are dissatisfied with the content that it generates.

In Stomp, the company owns the delivery mode, but not the content. It is expecting the customers to generate content for themselves. How is one ever going to persuade these customers to buy the (unsatisfactory) content that Straits Times represents? If one doesn't close this loop, how is Stomp going to save the Straits Times?

 

This is not to cast undeserved aspersions on the content that the Straits Times generates. In many ways, it is quite a good newspaper. Its foreign coverage, for example, is virtually unmatched in the region. Unfortunately, the one area where it should have unique strength -– reporting and analysis of domestic politics and society -– is precisely the area that it regularly falls short. With rising expectations, particularly the educated segment of our population, this weakness is increasingly seen as unacceptable. It's no wonder, in addition to other worldwide trends against print, the Straits Times is losing readership.


In a very unusual move, the Straits Times has begun to advertise itself in media that it does not own, in this case, on an illuminated box at a bus stop. Its tagline "A part of my life" gives away the marketing problem that the newspaper is trying to address -- that people are increasingly seeing the Straits Times as irrelevant to their information needs.
  

One can see serious attempts to move with the times. Recently, Chua Mui Hoong effectively told the government in her column that refusal to offer upgrading of public housing blocks in an even-handed way between People's Action Party constituencies and opposition-held wards is plain wrong. Rarely have I seen such a boldly critical piece about a stated policy.

Yet, there is a long way to go. When Ho Khai Leong, an academic, spoke at a forum organised by the National University of Singapore Society, calling for the abolition of the positions of Senior Minister and Minister Mentor, he was not reported. Opposition politician Chee Soon Juan's specific complaints about how the Straits Times and sister papers' reporters slant their reports against him are not carried.

To give just 5 examples where I have yet to see critical commentary, off the top of my head, are these:

  • about our compliant judiciary,
     
  • about whether it is good for Singapore that the wife of the Prime Minister should head the holding company of state-owned enterprises,
     
  • about how indefensible it is for Singapore to discriminate against gays and lesbians in law and government policy, and
     
  • about how fundamentalist Christian influences have seeped into state policies.
     
  • about how there is no media freedom in Singapore.

Until I see these 5 viewpoints expressed freely in the Straits Times, I will not be convinced that anything has changed.

Oh, let me add a 6th litmus test: just as the Straits Times carries verbatim reports of government politicians' speeches, so should it carry verbatim, opposition politicians' speeches, failing which, offer space to them for commentary articles from time to time.

 

A well-known case is that of the TimeWarner and AOL merger. 

TimeWarner was essentially a content company; its strength was in generating content that people wanted. AOL was strong in internet delivery.

It was thought at the time of the merger that synergies would be obvious, but years later, there is still very little to be seen. In fact, there are persistent calls to break up the marriage in order to unlock value for shareholders.

The point I'm making is that content companies don't always benefit by over-investing in delivery-type businesses which don't need the content for success.

 
But "netspeak" may be worse

Yet, despite my criticism of the Straits Times, the "netspeak" that is likely to characterise Stomp may be worse.

Already, within days of its launch, Singlish pidgin is becoming the lingua franca of Stomp.

Content-wise, although it is early days yet, one can expect it to be similar to everything else out there in most bulletin boards and blogs: chatter that is not just parochial, but self-centred, more interested in what one's bum is sitting on than in the wider world.

Especially when the company is more concerned with market share and traffic volume, and thus will probably be hesitant about pruning poor quality stuff, one can expect on Stomp a gassy inflation of subjective "takes" by all and sundry. Few will have time for objective knowledge.

It is alas, a disease of the very democratic medium that is the internet, where every individual can put forth his voice. Before long, he is fooled into thinking that his own banal thoughts about his petty interests, not to mention his illogical rants, are equivalent to organised information and critical analyses about the big issues of the day.

Yet the latter is what a good newspaper should be about, and I do hope one day, the Straits Times is that. That kind of well-researched, organised content is a unique selling proposition of a good newspaper company.

But the nature of Stomp is such that, it is the worst habits of netspeak that is likely to be encouraged. Far from cultivating an audience for the journalism products that a quality newspaper can generate, self-service portals cultivate a disdain for that kind of content.

In addition, netspeak is characterised by attention-deficit disorder. Any body of text longer than 500 words is too long to read -– I know because I get regular complaints that Yawning Bread articles are way too wordy. Yet there are certain ideas that cannot be put across unless the reader is able to focus deeply, and no newspaper can achieve quality unless it has readers who appreciate intellectual depth.

So it's baffling to me how the Straits Times can expect the market that is cultivated by a portal like Stomp to ever desire the products that a good newspaper company should be proud of; the products that should be its core strength, its enduring reputation and its keep.

© Yawning Bread 

 

 

 

 

The source of the problem?

Straits Times' problem may be a problem of our education system. Too many Singaporeans come out of the system

  • uncomfortable with good English, and therefore unable to sustain their attention on a passage of any length;
     
  • uninterested in the big issues of the day (narrow horizons, politically apathetic), uncurious about things that don't immediately concern them;
     
  • afraid of intellectual debate, and therefore unappreciative of what a good newspaper ought to be.

Of course, the newspaper's problem is also a problem of our authoritarian political system. It can't grow or gain in credibility if certain topics must remain taboo. And if the newspaper can't cover the topics that people want covered, then why should people buy it?

 

Footnotes

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Addenda

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