Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Straits Times Versus TODAY

On Saturday, 01st November, 2008, i read something amusing in the Voices section of TODAY (weekend’s edition).


In it, a VP from SPH by the name of Peter Khoo said SPH newspapers have bucked the trend of falling newspaper readership worldwide, and have managed to maintain a high level of readership in the face of competing demands of readers' time and attention by the Internet,
mobile and cable television.

In actual fact, Straits Times readership has fallen over the recent years. As more readers stop buying Shitty Times, I mean Straits Times, or terminate their subscription of it.

TODAY’s publisher rebutted Peter Khoo’s statement with the following:

“Looking back over the past 10 years, there is no getting away from the fact that The Straits Times’ share of readers has dropped from 46 per cent to the current 39 per cent (Nielsen Media Index 1998 to 2008). Also, The Straits Times’ circulation is at its 10-year low of 377,974 copies, against Today’s highest circulation ever of 300,000. I do not think this amounts to The Straits Times ‘bucking the trend’.”

I think Shitty Times is going the way of the dinosaur if it doesn’t dump its shitty broadsheet format to a tabloid format like TODAY’s. It’s virtually impossible to flip open a copy of the Shitty Times inside a packed train. Broadsheets are also more tiring to hold up than tabloid-sized newspapers.

I have observed another curious thing: Even though SPH has started wire-stitching My Paper (they have obviously been won over by the merits of doing so), they have yet to do the same for their New Paper.

3 Comments:

Blogger dilutedmagnetics said...

Geesh... we have subscription to the electronic and hardcopy version of ST at the office, but I've not touched the paper or logged on for the past 2 years now. I get all my news from google. Who needs the ST anymore? They report trash anyway. At least on google, I read the trash that I want, not something that someone is trying to force feed me with.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 3:27:00 PM GMT+8  
Blogger .:: JoyousJoy::. said...

i kind of agree tt not all free papers will gain readership..

I just remember those instances when I see a particular *** party distributing their free papers just outside raffles place MRT but no one pays any attention to them..

Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 9:09:00 AM GMT+8  
Blogger Mockingbird said...

To LIS: With more and more readers like yourself who get your daily fix of global news from the Internet, a traditional news publishers like SPH will be extinct like dinosaur eventually if they don't change their business model and medium of publishing.

To Nanny Joy: People dare not pay attention to Workers' Parter or SDP, etc. for fear of being "caught" by the gahmen. However we deny it, Singapore is still very much a police state and a regime of fear to a certain extent. Anybody who tries to be funny can get locked up indefinitely under the Internal Security Act without trial.

Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 11:13:00 AM GMT+8  

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