More political space needed to cope with falling ad revenue

by

P N BALJI

July 10th, 2007

Writing in Today, veteran editor P N Balji argues that newspapers need to practise less government-centric journalism to retain their readers’ interest and fight the trend of falling ad revenue. Read the full column on Today’s website.

So, what are the media managers doing? Opening up new revenue streams by investing overseas, kick-starting alternative media ventures and wooing expatriate readers who are surging into Singapore now that the floodgates have been thrown wide open. But these are slow-burn measures, risky and tentative. What is more important is to relook the kind of news in our media. Today, domestic news coverage has got an over-emphasis on government information, with nearly every item containing a mention of a minister, government policy or view. The end result is that the news gets predictable and even boring, as one group of young Singaporeans said during a focus group discussion.