But it also turned out to be much less than I expected, in that it didn't say very much, for all the story's 6 pages. If anything, I had the faint suspicion that it was part of an elaborate marketing campaign for the newspaper's portal, Stomp.

Leaving aside page S1, which was just a pictorial blurb, let me summarise the stuff in the feature (skip this part if you have already read the newspaper report):

On pages S2 and S3, Ong Soh Chin gave an overview of the subject matter, ranging from the pre-internet days to the latest successes in online newspapers.

Even in the pre-internet days, there were signal contributions from laymen and amateurs to notable news events, such as film recordings of the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy and the 1991 beating of Rodney King by 4 policemen in Los Angeles.

Then she moved into the present time. "Speed and quantity define citizen journalism today," she wrote, and as sure as the sun rises, the sentence is completed with a kowtow to the government's concerns: "and with them come the issues of veracity, accuracy and integrity."

Other than mentioning the 3 young men who were convicted last year under the Sedition Act for racist comments on the internet, most of the other examples came from America, e.g. huffington-post.com hosting a guest blog purportedly written by actor George Clooney (and later proven not to be so).

Ngee Ann Polytechnic lecturer Robin Yee was quoted as saying, "If you take on the mantle of journalism, society expects you to be responsible."

Fair enough, but is everything on the internet supposed to be journalism? What if it's meant as satire? What if it is meant as a political call to action? Do I judge playscripts or Greenpeace manifestoes by the standards of journalism?

So what if something is polemical or speculative? Is there no place in human communication for these?

Is the state, in trying to control the new media, attempting to define everything that touches on politics and society as journalism, thereby justifying the applicability of standards and legal penalties it desires?

Another point that the article raised but didn't develop was when Ong said, "In societies where the mainstream media has been strictly regulated, the question is: How educated and sophisticated is the citizen reader? If he has unthinkingly imbibed everything doled out to him, how will he cope in this loud and brawling new world of citizen journalism?"

"By the same token, " she wrote, "if he has grown disillusioned with the mainstream press, he is also in danger of embracing everything contrary that comes from alternative media, whether it is of value or not."

This may be an important issue and it cries out for further discussion as to whether this is true in the Singapore context. And if it is true that the consumer of news here has long been dulled by a controlled and uncritical media, leaving him vulnerable to the exuberance of new media, is the answer more paternalism, in the name of protecting him from his own naïveté?

Most stories are submitted by ordinary people, though there are 95 full-timers as reporters and editors, and the site "churns out about 160 articles each day, attracting a daily audience of at least half a million."

The third short feature was on backfence.com, a US website that serves up "hyperlocal" news for various small communities.

Page S5 was where the Straits Times began to sing its Stomp song. It featured Housten Lim, who had contributed a few photographs to the portal and won a camera as a result.

Also on this page was Ong Soh Chin's secondary article "There's no pleasing the conspiracy theorists", touching on the way many people ascribed malevolent motives to Straits Times for setting up the portal.

Here on this page too was a story about Steven Goh, a 40-year-old single father who keeps a blog. The Straits Times quoted him saying that he wanted to set an example as someone who can be counted on to express his views responsibly. 

"I want to be responsible for what I say," Goh told the Straits Times.

"So he has no worries about putting his photograph and particulars on his blog," reporter Ho Ai Li wrote.

I thought it too obvious by half that the Straits Times found such an uplifting example for the edification of all those mischievous Singaporeans out there saying bad things about the government while hiding behind pseudonyms like "Mr Brown".

Pages S4 and S5 too contained pictures submitted by "citizen journalists" to Stomp: a bird, a snake, wasps and litter.

Page S6 was devoted to Stomp. "Stomp reveals a slice of life in the neighbourhood" was the headline, which makes it seem that it is acquiring a "hyperlocal" quality.

There were interesting nuggets of information, nonetheless. In the first 25 days of operation, amidst a tidal wave of advertising -– so much that it is beginning to annoy -– Stomp received 2,174 SMS messages and 335 MMS photos and video clips.

Han Fook Kwang, the Editor of the Straits Times, conceded, "We have not been flooded with material."

Why do I say that the multi-page feature was much less than I expected? Well, for all the words, it seemed long on description and short on analysis.

But partly too, I must have been misled by the questions that the Straits Times emailed to me a week prior. These were the questions I received:

1. Do you think citizen journalism is good or bad?
    
2. Do you think that this trend will thrive in Singapore? Why? Do you think citizen journalism will replace traditional mainstream journalism?
    
3. How do you think it would be best to deal with slanderous comments and inaccuracies in citizen journalism?
    
4. Should citizen journalists be accountable for their words?
    
5. How does one nurture a free environment without it becoming irresponsible and damaging?
    
6. Do you foresee any future problems? People getting arrested through the Sedition Act, etc?
    
7. Do you have any comments about the other bloggers in Singapore like Xia Xue, etc? Do you feel that their part in citizen journalism makes this trend all the more interesting?
    
8. Any other comments?

As a result, I thought the feature would be a discussion about contestation of views and boundaries: Where do we draw the lines? How do we enforce the lines? Should there even be any formal lines?

I believe others were given similar questions too, because scattered across the various pages were quotes from academics Cherian George, Robin Yee, Brenda Chan, Tan Tarn How and Mark Cenite.

George gave his definition of citizen journalism, but added that "The potential of citizen journalism today is limited by access to information. For many aspects of life in Singapore, the authorities monopolise information and release it selectively to the accredited media. Citizen journalism has greater potential in countries with Freedom of Information Acts, empowering ordinary citizens to obtain data from the government."

Tan Tarn How said, "The authorities should as far as possible not use the law to crack down on people -- and I have not seen an instance where they should have, even in the case of the racist bloggers....  A marketplace of ideas should do the trick. There will also be irresponsible people, but public opinion will right things by pointing them out or ignoring them."

Mark Cenite had the same view: "I don't think that the law is the best way to deal with slanderous comments. We should just allow the marketplace of ideas to operate. If enough voices participate, the truth will eventually come out. The law should be a last resort."

What was quoted from me, you can see in the picture below.

But it was really strange that these opinions about prospects for citizen journalism and regulation were sprinkled about as isolated quotes. None of the text articles (described in the first part of this essay) engaged with these points of view, which the reporters had set out to gather the week before.

Perhaps they started with that topic in mind, but halfway through, the feature story was hijacked to serve the marketing of Stomp instead?

After all, it would have been difficult to serve both objectives at the same time. The Straits Times would want to position Stomp as citizen journalism. Yet, if it goes on like a broken record about how citizen journalism is irresponsible, and how anonymous bloggers pose a threat to racial and religious harmony and national stability, all in the service of the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts, wouldn't the paper then be knocking its own portal? Let's not forget, one of the stomp bloggers is anonymous himself.
 

I found your questions rather troubling. They seem to be taking off from the agenda points raised by the PAP government, even though some of these points are not particularly important, but primarily self-serving.

Why do I say they are not particularly important? Because other countries (including Malaysia) have seen online journalism flourish without these "fears" becoming an issue. So why should these "fears" be so significant in Singapore only? They thus represent not any objective appraisal of risk, but the subjective compulsions of the PAP government.

Yet your newspaper is planning to run a feature predicated upon these same, self-serving, agenda points. By so doing, you will be lending significance to the insignificant.

In the end, they didn't run a feature predicated upon these same, self-serving, agenda points. Instead, they served up Stomp.

There was one final bit of silliness. 

The reporter emailed me a few days later to check how I wish to be described. I said to her I preferred to be known as a "gay activist". This is not just whim, because the primary motivation for Yawning Bread when it started was gay activism. It is the chief reason for my being on the web today.

Later, she emailed back to say that her editors could not bring themselves to use that description -– which is another way of saying that I am not allowed to describe myself. They would instead describe me as a "civil rights activist".

It just blows your mind, doesn't it, that after going on and on about accuracy in reporting, this kind of deliberate blurring can still happen.

However, I am not unhappy. In making that swap, the Straits Times has pointed to and endorsed equivalence: gay equality is very much a part of civil rights. 

© Yawning Bread