http://themiddleground.sg/2016/05/28...space/Shake-up in the online space
May 28, 2016 07.03PM | Bertha Henson linkedin
by Bertha Henson
THE G sure has a way of springing the news on you. In December 2013, it issued a press statement on Breakfast Network, which had declined to register the website, just an hour or so before I was to appear on a ChannelNewsAsia programme. I was rattled enough to want to pull out, but in the end, I stayed on the panel. I wondered then if the timing was coincidental.
Then yesterday, the G ruined The Independent Singapore’s big day when it made public police reports filed against the site for contravening Cooling Off Day and Polling Day rules. Now, in 2013, not that many people knew I was going on TV, but the TISG had informed media outlets about its impending press conference to announce its collaboration with The Online Collective. Coincidence?
So what has been happening in the online world?
Plenty. The news is not good for news-sites. Money-wise, Six-Six News, set up in June last year, has closed shop and so has Inconvenient Questions which started six months earlier.
Said Six-Six News chief Kannan Chandran: “Given the economic climate, this has been a difficult time for a start-up in the media space. The team, whose contributions I value, worked diligently to get the site going, but it was disappointing that the anticipated subsequent funding didn’t come through as expected.”
Said IQ’s founder Viswa Sadasivan: “For the past few months, I’ve been trying to negotiate some kind of a deal, but it didn’t quite work out… Basically, the funds have dried up,”
Funding online sites is a real problem as even those who belong to MSM will attest to. Without deep pockets or side income from other activities, an online operation is hardly sustainable as a business unit. Eyebrows were raised when it was disclosed that The Real Singapore made $20,000 or so a month from ad revenue. This is really small beer given its reach of some 134 million pageviews. And really kachang putih when compared to a one-time appearance of an advertisement on the front page of The Straits Times.
Long-time player, The Online Citizen, is taking a break in June ostensibly to re-think its strategy and give its one-man-operation a rest. It’s not surprising given that it has parted ways with its fund-raising arm The Online Collective in October last year. The collective’s director Tan Tee Seng said in a press statement then: “We understand from the editors of TOC that they would like to seek their own methods of sustainable funding, rather than use the business model outlined by The Opinion Collaborative for the website.”
In case anyone hadn’t noticed, this was about when TISG seemed to have revived itself with a greater output of articles from former TOC associates such as Mr Ravi Philemon and Mr Howard Lee. Of course, at the point in time, there was no indication that they would partner another ex-TOC associate-cum-founder, Mr Kumaran Pillai, who set up TISG in November 2015.
We wonder what business model the collective had in mind for TOC. Perhaps, the same business model had been proposed to TISG, and had a better reception. One indication: While both are heavily socio-political news sites, TISG has indicated that it would branch into business news too.
Frankly, there is no money in being a socio-political news site. In fact, it won’t even garner as many eyeballs as lifestyle bloggers do. But it sure is a fast way to get more attention. Note that Six-Six News, IQ and yes, The Middle Ground, were set up in an election year. I can say for TMG that we launched to catch the appetite for news that usually spikes at major political events. But political reporting and commentary is not enough to retain eyeballs. A site must serve a variety of appetites which is why TMG introduced several lifestyle components in the form of family, health and economic stories from the beginning of this year. (Yes, this is a plug for TMG.)
Writing about politics also means that a news site must be clear about what is reporting and commentary and whether it has an ideological position. Every news site, including us, will swear that it is independent and neutral and neither for or against any political agency or alignment. True or false, it is for readers to discern motivations. But a lot also depends not just on the content but also in the way the content is written or presented, and the perception of readers.
So I was reading news about the police reports on “election advertising” in TISG. The two offending articles cited had to do with its coverage of the final rallies on May 5. The next day was Cooling Off day. Any journalist will know how uphill it is to report – on deadline – night rallies with so many speakers. This is why the Cooling Off day rules allows for publication of “reports” on what happened the night before. I have always taken this to mean plain, vanilla reports with not a hint of commentary. For online news sites, it is not enough to do plain vanilla reporting because we’ll always be beaten by the more resource-rich MSM. So there has to be a concept and some commentary that will add value to our work. On May 5, I took it upon myself to report the last rallies and managed to publish a complimentary (yes, I acknowledge this) report on Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugam’s speech one minute before midnight.
The two TISG articles were clearly not complimentary of Mr Tharman or the People’s Action Party. You can read the first article on 5 highlights of Mr Tharman’s speech here. This would have been all right even if you disagree with the “slant” – if it made the deadline.
As for the second piece, you might wonder what the views of the Workers’ Party has to do with the BBBE since it isn’t a player. You might also wonder about the timing of the piece which has WP members attacking the PAP, if not exactly endorsing the Singapore Democratic Party. At any time, this would have been within the rules, methinks, but the lines were clearly drawn for Cooling off Day.
TISG said in its response: “We published the two articles as we did not believe they contained any new material that is not already in the public domain. In particular, the speech by Minister Tharman was already well covered in mainstream media.”
It’s not the material that’s material. It’s how the material is presented that’s material.
What bothers me is that if the Election Department found the articles so offensive, it should have had the Media Development Authority issue “take-down” orders to TISG, like it did for us when it said we published a poll of voters, which is not allowed during the election period (not just Cooling Off Day). Instead, it issued a statement to the media, warning against election advertising rather than telling off TISG directly.
As for the third piece on Dr Tan Cheng Bock denying that he had expressed views on the BBBE, I suppose the “advertising” portion was him de-linking himself from past criticism of Dr Chee Soon Juan. This was published on Polling Day.
The trouble with the thicket of rules is that kiasu-ism is your best protection. You abide by both the letter and the spirit of the rules. We found out for ourselves that the definition of a poll is so wide that any report asking anyone for an opinion might come under its ambit.
(In case you’re interested, here’s an update on what’s happening to that police report filed against us: nine of us were interviewed by the police over the article, from intern to artist to publisher. There’s no word yet on the outcome of the investigation.)
You know something? When The Middle Ground started operating in June last year, we thought we were entering a crowded space.
Now we’re feeling a little lonely.