just rambling

The reality of The Straits Times

Straits Times put on trial its latest “feature” today — seeing the world through tinted lenses (aka 3D glasses).

The paper says this is one way it is trying to improve itself, by allowing its readers to get the news from a different perspective. So I decided to do a simple quantitative analysis to find out if it was so. It turned out that only 10 out of the 65 news photo and graphics (excluding small profile pictures) could be seen in 3D perspective. On the other hand, some 20 advertisements were 3D ready. Plus, that pair of 3D spectacles was “Brought to You by Samsung”. And, if you didn’t know, TODAY newspaper was actually the first to bring 3D to newspapers. They worked with Panasonic Singapore and were upfront about it.

Most importantly, they kept it out of editorial content.

This aggressive campaign by Samsung and Panasonic to reinvent advertising on our local newspapers to push the 3D agenda is one thing. But, 3D editorial content? I’m not sure if it works, at all.

Besides the fact that it takes 1.5 hours for the photo desk to process a 3D photo, and photographers having to shoot such that it is suitable for 3D, the effect is simply not very nice at all. Through those glasses, the photos lose their colour. Without them, the photo looks blur. Moreover, none of the photos I saw today convinced me that seeing something pop out was nothing more than gimmicky. And, let’s not even start on how those spectacles hinders the reading experience!

If ST is really keen on improving their readers’ needs for images in the newspaper, then put it in multimedia journalism like this, and give more space to infographics and photojournalism in the newspaper and online. No need for anything fanciful, just let the talented photographers and artists do good old visual storytelling.

The only reason why I think ST hopped on to 3D was because it is ‘cool’ now to have it, and I won’t be surprised if it was heavily subsidised by the advertisers in some way or another.

Advocating Journalism, Advocacy Journalism

After embarking on the interesting option of publishing my final-year journalism project online last year, it was heartening to see the junior batch take their projects online too. While I love my printed newspaper, there is no doubt that the future of journalism must go online in some way. On a personal level, it’s also an excellent platform to ensure your project doesn’t get forgotten in the archives, but remains out there to be Googled on as and when the topic becomes relevant.

Kababayan: Faces of Filipinas in Singapore is a photojournalism project by Kong Yen Lin and Nura Ling that puts a new face to the Filipino women migrant community in Singapore. Long regarded as just here to work as domestic maids, Filipinas who come to Singapore today increasingly span different classes and occupations including designers, businesswomen, nurses and teachers. It is an impressive depth of work that uses multimedia slideshows and photo essays to bring you through the life of some 16 Filipinas living and working in Singapore. It would have been even more impressive with better editing though, especially in the multimedia slideshows. There’s just a bit too much going on to keep me watching till the end.

Food Waste Republic is an investigative journalism piece that looks at food wastage in Singapore through feature stories, multimedia slideshows and quotes from experts. Readers are also encouraged to interact with the project by submiting photos to the “Food Waste Police”. The team of Estelle Low, Miak Aw and Chen Wei Li have really put in a lot of effort, even going through people’s rubbish to document the extent of the problem. While surfing the website, one thing that kept going off in my mind was, where does journalism end and advocacy start? I wondered if this project is a campaign to reduce food wastage rather than a journalism piece, especially with snazzy look of the website and the attempt to ‘police’ food wastage. But then, is there a difference between the two? Shouldn’t all journalists care a lot about the topic they write for?

On this note about caring and journalism I like to point to an encouraging initiative going in my alma mater: Photojournalism@NTU. I’m not sure if it’ll become an annual event, but photojournalism students this year got a chance to showcase their works and meet fellow photojournalists and editors in the industry in this networking session. I saw a lot of great work out there — all photo essays about Singapore. The current instructor, Tay Kay Chin, has promised to continue pushing these young photojournalists to point their lenses at what’s going on here instead of exotic foreign lands. I really agree that there are too many stories untold here.

And after seeing all the work of these young journalists, I wondered why is it that our local newspapers remain so staid? Whether it is in terms of topics, or the medium, one finds it hard to consistently detect the vigour as seen in these students’ works. There is good news, especially for photojournalists. When asked about photojournalism’s place in The Straits Times during the session, its photo editor said that a micro-site was coming up soon on ST’s website that will showcase multimedia slideshows and photo essays from their photojournalists. They may accept works from the public too.

Other than that, I’m not confident anything else is really going to change. For one, the people right up there making decisions have been there for years (Sumiko Tan wrote about her jubilee at the organisation in today’s Sunday Times, and she’s not the only one, nor the longest). And, without competition here, hardly anything changes as my research on ST’s newspaper redesign has shown.

For me, the saddest part about all this is not that I may never get to read a great Singaporean newspaper. But, I may never see these young journalists’ byline beyond their final-year projects because they gave up chasing stories for a paper that will never showcase them in a manner that they truly deserve.

A Design of Its Time

Keeping up with the times – the changing look of Singapore’s longest surviving English newspaper The Straits Times.

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First published in  The Design Society Journal,
and edited into seven posts for this site.
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A newspaper is often seen as a mirror of its society. While this usually refers to the content of the paper, what is often passed over is how its appearance is part of that reflection too.

If you stop reading the newspaper for a moment and examine its overall look and individual elements instead, you would notice how its nameplate, the type of underlying grid, choice of typefaces, and even the paper’s size come together to shape the experience of the newspaper that we take for granted in our daily read.

“Any newspaper we read conveys its personality through the accumulation of these visual cues,” writes visual communications professor Kevin G. Barnhurst.[i] “We assume that it is the writing that makes the difference, but that is only partly true.”

Yet newspaper design is more than its aesthetics, it is a means to convey a message, summed up in former editor of Britain’s The Sunday Times Harold Evans’ observation, “[D]esign is part of journalism. Design is not decoration. It is communication.”[ii]

It for this reason that newspapers, like The Straits Times (ST) in Singapore, have periodically spent money and time to redesign its product.

Explaining ST’s 1998 redesign, then editor Leslie Fong wrote: “The short answer is that we have to – if we wish to stay on top of the competition and give you a better paper.” He adds, “And the competition is not just against other media or information providers but also, increasingly, for your time.”[iii]

A newspaper’s design thus becomes a visual expression of its readers’ values and environment that the paper operates within. Each design change is a deliberate move driven by the need to stay relevant to its readers. In a sense the changing looks of the 164-year-old ST, the oldest English newspaper still around, serves as an archive of how Singapore has changed from a British colony to an independent First-World nation today.

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Introduction } 1960s } 1970s } 1980s } 1989 } 1998 } 2000s
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• [i] Kevin G. Barnhurst, Seeing the Newspaper, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
• [ii] Harold Evans, Book Five: Newspaper Design, 5 vols., Editing and Design: A Five-Volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout, London: Heinemann, 1973.
• [iii] Leslie Fong, “The Aim: To Give You a Better Paper ” The Straits Times, March 22 1998, HOME, 23.

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A Design of Its Time — 1960s

Keeping up with the times – the changing look of Singapore’s longest surviving English newspaper The Straits Times.

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Introduction } 1960s } 1970s } 1980s } 1989 } 1998 } 2000s
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Finding a national voice

In 1959, with a gothic-typeface nameplate, vertical eight-column layout and Bodoni Bold and Century typefaces anchoring the headlines, ST looked very much like a British paper.

This reflected its heritage and the fact that it was founded and managed by expatriates, even if run by local English-educated journalists. The paper was largely designed by then managing editor Khoo Teng Soon, also known as T.S. Khoo. Influenced by London’s Daily Express’[i] layout style, Khoo capitalised ST’s lead story headline and stretched it across the entire width of the cover – just like the Express.

But this look was set to change in the same year that Lee Kuan Yew came to power leading Singapore as a self-governing state. Lee had always regarded ST as a British paper and he was suspicious of the paper’s loyalties and place in a nation aspiring to independence with Malaya.[ii]

In a possible attempt to shed this British image as a wave of nationalism swept through both territories, the ST of the 1960s evolved from the Express model. In order to survive as “Malaya’s National Newspaper” circulating both in Malaya and Singapore, it had to look less British.

As Evans observed of a late 1960s edition of ST, “This Malayan morning paper used to be modelled on the London Daily Express, with even bigger banner headlines. It has now gone into lower-case, gaining emphasis for the lead by bringing the weight down the page.”[iii]

No longer emphatically Express-like, ST explored other means to express the drama of its time – more white space, lowercase letters and larger type size. This further culminated in a change of its editorial voice in March 1968, where its three stuffy single-column Editorials became set apart on the left-hand side of the page and given more space to breathe.

At this time, the paper was still serving two different territories despite the failure of the merger between Malaysia and Singapore in 1965. However by the end of the same year, the failed merger would come to be reflected in its changed tagline from “Malaysia’s National Newspaper” to something more ambiguous – “The National Newspaper”, while still hanging on to a nameplate leftover from colonial days.

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• [i] Mary Turnbull, Dateline Singapore: 150 Years of the Straits Times, Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, 1995, 154-157.
• [ii] Ibid.
• [iii] Evans, Book Five: Newspaper Design, 128.

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A Design of Its Time — 1970s

Keeping up with the times – the changing look of Singapore’s longest surviving English newspaper The Straits Times.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Introduction } 1960s } 1970s } 1980s } 1989 } 1998 } 2000s
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

The Herald of a new face

The arrival of the Singapore Herald into the local newspaper market in July 1970 introduced competition to ST for the first time since its last competitor, The Tiger Standard, closed in 1959.

To take on the Herald, Khoo was sent back to Singapore from its Malaysian office to “brighten up” ST.[i] But the competition never quite materialised as the Singapore Herald was closed down amidst much controversy a year later.

As if assured of its monopoly, the paper stayed largely the same. In September 1972, ST became a Singapore-based paper when it parted company with its Malaysian assets, which became the New Straits Times.

ST’s design was changed to reflect this new status. To distinguish itself as a Singaporean paper, news from Malaysia was grouped into a section, Across the Causeway. In September 1973, the paper unveiled a new nameplate typeset in the modern-looking Bodoni and dropped its tagline altogether.

But the new nameplate was overshadowed by the paper changing to a ten-column grid from its previous eight because of a world-shortage of newsprint[ii]. An earlier switch to nine-columns was deemed insufficient with worsening strikes in the paper mills. With narrower columns and no luxury of white space, the paper became harder to read. Moreover, it was still using a mixture of typefaces to express variety and dramatisation of news, creating a cacophony of headlines for the reader.

By the second half of the 1970s, the paper had grown to over 30 pages from a 20-page read in 1959. It now had a regular Forum section to house readers’ letters. To aid the reader’s navigation of the thicker paper, an index, INSIDE, was introduced on the cover in March 1972.[iii] As and when it was necessary, the paper would also come in two parts.

One year after ST adopted its first formal editorial policy in 1977, it began carrying out its new stated mission “to inform, to educate, to activate and to entertain.”[iv]

The second part of ST was officially designated its leisure and educational supplement known as Section Two[v]. Inside, were the Leisure Page, Woman Plus, and the Bilingual page where readers could learn Chinese. However, the bulk of this new four to twenty-page section were actually just pages chock-full of advertisements.

To succeed in the Singapore market, ST wanted to provide content with mass appeal and quality to garner a maximum readership to attract advertisers, but its design, which was largely unchanged since 1959, was not keeping up with this new vision.

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• [i] Turnbull, 287.
• [ii] “From Today a Tenth Column,” The Straits Times, September 3 1978.
• [iii] First observed in The Straits Times, March 14 1972.
• [iv] Turnbull, 318.
• [v] “Change with the Times for Easier Reading,” The Straits Times, September 25 1978.

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