Category: Media

Singapore’s New Creatives Mediascape

The world of content creation is changing, and I was reminded of this after reading The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, and watching the documentary PressPausePlay this week. Both pieces of work touched upon how the digital era was changing not only how content was created, but also who was doing so and what was being produced.

This can be seen in Singapore’s media scene, which has traditionally been dominated by Singapore Press Holdings and Mediacorp. Both produce content for newspapers, magazines, television and radio — the traditional mediums of communication. They derive their revenue mainly from the content they produced, depending heavily on advertisers, as well as subscribers.

Not so for a new breed of media producers in Singapore. Besides individual bloggers, there seems to be an increasing list of publications produced by teams of people in the genre of lifestyle, arts, and culture. Take a look at Actually Magazine, a website on lifestyle and culture. The people behind it? The owners of fashion stores ACTUALLY…, ActuallyActually and Very Wooonderland. Then, there’s POSKOD.SG, an online magazine about modern Singapore that was started by a branding agency Studio Wong Huzir.

Besides starting publications online, some of these new media producers have also entered the world of print too. Branding agency kult has released the sixth issue of its illustration magazine of the same name, while design studio HJGHER is on its second issue of its lifestyle publication Underscore Magazine. Anonymous, started by the designers at SILNT, have also embarked on Bracket, a magazine that features the thoughts of some of the best minds in today’s creative world.

The one thing that is common about all these publications? None of them actually make a living off it. Instead, they are often passion projects of local creative-base companies who fund the publications with what they earn from their core business, which isn’t media. As The Story So Far notes:

“If the old formula of “adjacency” — selling ads and commercials alongside content — is fading, what will replace it? There are many possibilities, but few are likely, on their own, to provide the stream of dollars that advertising and circulation once did.”

While these publications may not earn their publishers money, there are other benefits. It is a vehicle of getting your brand out to a larger audience, creating something that expresses your values and beliefs. Both Underscore and Bracket have enabled their Singapore founders to be known overseas after the publications snagged awards and accolades.

Having their own publication also helps cultivate audiences and markets, especially if it is small and undefined. This is probably why government boards have also created their own online publications such as the National Heritage Board’s Yesterday.sg and the National Art Gallery’s The Canvas to promote their respective causes.

But it’s not just commercial companies that are redefining Singapore’s mediascape. There are also groups of Singaporeans who have harnessed the ease of publishing nowadays to pursue their own interests, forking out of their own time and money. One of the oldest must be The Flying Inkpot, a theatre and dance review that has been around since 1996. For film buffs, there is SINdie, which reports on Singapore’s independent film scene, literary lovers can turn to Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Ceriph, while academics and critical thinkers can try out the multidisciplinary e-journal s/pores.

The magazines I have listed here are only just a small sampling of what there is out there. If you know of others I may have missed out, do let me know!

Look What I Found!

I love books and magazines, not only as something to be read, but also how it looks and feels.

In Singapore, I love visiting the National Library at Bugis and the neighbouring Bras Brasah Complex to hunt for books, especially old ones forgotten with the passage of time.

I was recently looking through old issues of the Singapore Institute of Architect Journal, or what is known today as just Singapore Architect, when I chanced upon these avant garde covers from 1985. Wow!

And just today I was checking out Basheer Graphic Book’s month-long 20 per cent sale storewide when I found this gem: designer and critic Ken Garland’s A Word In Your Eye (1996).


Credit: ken garland & associates

This collection of his essays from 1960 till 1996 is out of print and no longer available for sale on Amazon or online used book webstore Alibris. So even though it was slightly worn and had a dog-ear on the bottom of the cover, I forked out $50 for the last copy —  another book to add to the home I am building out of them…

The return of political cartoons

“You cannot mock a great leader in an Asian Confucian society.
If he allows himself to be mocked, he is finished.”
Lee Kuan Yew commenting on how the media portrayed the Tiananmen demonstrations using cartoons and caricatures

Election fever and the lack of state regulation online saw a resurgence in a graphic form that has almost become extinct in Singapore: political cartoons.

Throughout the 2011 General Election, several blogs published cartoons on how they saw the hustings, often poking fun at politicians and the remarks they made. Below is a list of some of them, click to check out their cartoons!

Except for Cartoon Press, the other five blogs have been around for  a while. Both My Sketchbook and Blinking Brink are the oldest, having been around since 2006.

While the cartoons may look amateurish, their content is much more hard-hitting that what you’ll find on the newspapers, where editorial cartoons like these have traditionally been found. The government’s tight control of the mass media over the last few decades had forced out similar work from pioneers like Kwan Sai Kheong, Tan Huay Peng and Morgan Chua.

The late Kwan freelanced for the Singapore Free Press and The Straits Timesbetween 1946 and 1951, before he eventually became a Permanent Secretary. He also designed the Merlion statue. Peng joined ST in 1955, and when he left in 1962 he was the paper’s Chief Artist. Even after his departure, the late Peng continued to contribute work to the paper till the ’80s. Finally, Morgan started out at the Singapore Herald, and after the newspaper got banned in the 1970s, he left for Hong Kong to draw for the Far Eastern Economic Review for the next 25 years.

The generation of editorial cartoonists that followed, like ST’s Dengcoy Miel, Lee Chee Chew, The New Paper’s Lee Hup Kheng and Lianhe Zaobao’s Heng Kim Song did not draw their inspiration from politics, or at least local politics. The only exception, although his work was not published in newspapers, was George Nonis who published two cartoon books documenting the generational change in Singapore’s politics with his Hello Chok Tong, Goodbye Kuan Yew (1991) book, and a decade later, From Kuan Yew to Chok Tong And Beyond (2001).

If you’re interested to find out more about editorial cartoons and Singapore’s history, check out Lim Cheng Tju’s Singapore Comix. He has also been written well-researched pieces, including Lest We Forget: The importance of history in Singapore and Malaysia Comic Studies.