Unfazed by brickbats, Temasek Review aims to boldly go where no blog has gone before
December 11, 2009 by Our Correspondent
Filed under Opinion, Society
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By Bhavan Jaipragas from journalism.sg
(The below article is republished here with kind permission from the author)
Within Singapore’s increasingly influential new media sphere, Temasek Review (TR) has emerged as one of the more controversial players.
With an ambitious mission statement and vision, TR was quickly regarded as a site to watch. In recent months however, it has been mired in controversy. The blogosphere has been set alight with a flurry of discussions about TR, with some netizens expressing a curiosity about its motives while others have openly attacked it.
TR remains as ambitious as ever. “In ten years’ time, the internet will emerge as the primary source of news for many Singaporeans and we want to be a key player when that happens,” its caretaker manager said in an e-mail interview (full text below). He said the target was to register as a company, earn revenue through advertising and employ full-time journalists – something no socio-political website in Singapore has managed to do. Refusing to divulge more details, he said that the website was still “exploring the best option to take”, citing Malaysiakini and Huffington Post as possible models that his website might want to emulate.
The representative agreed to the interview on condition of anonymity, saying that this was in line with TR’s policy to “keep a loose structure for the time being” as the website was still finalising its organisational setup. Such coyness is one reason why many netizens are suspicious. Although many sites allow anonymous comments, Singapore’s most influential independent sites have founders who were open about their own identities from day one. These range from the Singapore’s first online magazine, Sintercom (Tan Chong Kee) and the grandfather of blogs, Yawning Bread (Alex Au), to later arrivals such as The Online Citizen (Choo Zheng Xi), Mr Brown (Lee Kim Mun), and even hard-hitting activist sites such as Singapore Rebel (Martyn See).
In contrast, TR has a page dedicated to the profiles of its columnists, but its leadership remains incognito. A significant number of the website’s articles are attributed to nameless “Correspondents”. This shroud of secrecy has led to rampant speculation about TR’s motives, with some suggesting that the website is not quite the “independent, balanced and unbiased” Internet newspaper it has positioned itself to be.
The caretaker manager who answered our queries was not too fazed by such rumours. He said that “content is more important than the writer”, citing how other news entities like The Economist and Malaysiakini regularly do not attribute articles to any specific writer. He added that many of the website’s writers were not comfortable to reveal their real identities, but the number of hits on their articles showed that readers were not too turned off by their anonymity. Discounting what he called the “traditional view that a site has to be run by credible people”, he said that what was more important for a website like Temasek Review was to build its influence through increased readership even if that meant quality was sometimes compromised.
TR has also been accused of wanton plagiarism. Recently, an anonymous blogger set up a blog highlighting several instances where content generated by elite news entities like AFP, Voice of America and China’s People Daily were passed of as original content on Temasek Review. The bylines at the beginning of these articles attributed them to TR’s own “Correspondent”.
The manager of Temasek Review dismissed these allegations, stating that the articles quoted in the blog “all have the sources stated at the bottom which he (the blogger) had deliberately chosen to omit when cropping them”. According to him, such a copy and paste method of news aggregation employed by Temasek Review was justified, considering how mainstream newspapers like The Straits Times regularly republished international news content produced by the wire agencies. He further added that the website could not be faulted “as long as we quote the source of the news” and that “everything posted in the Internet is for sharing under a Common Licensing Scheme unless explicitly stated otherwise”.
TR states on its site that it is a subscriber to various news sources. However, it may be ignoring the fact that individual subscriptions to news media do not include the right to reproduce their content. Indeed, commercial news media explicit forbid such unlicensed use of their stories and visuals.
In this age of news aggregation, most news organisations have allowed news aggregators like The Huffington Post and Google News to carry link headlines and excerpts, as long as the full article remains on the source’s website. TR, however, reproduces others’ articles on its own site. Its sources don’t seem to have taken so far, probably because TR is still too small a player to worry about. If TR becomes as big a player as it wants to be, however, its copy-and-paste journalism will probably attract a few lawyers’ letters for copyright infringement.
Though profits are not the ultimate objective of Temasek Review, the plan is for it to be self-sustaining in the long term. It was revealed to us that the website is currently “fully self-funded”, with the caretaker manager one of the contributors. “It does not cost much to maintain the website at this stage”, he said. Part of the website’s financial strategy is also to have advertisement revenue from its sister website East Asia Review subsidise operating costs.
The ambitious plans of the website seem to have no place for other players in the local new media scene. When asked about the relationship between Temasek Review and other independent new media entities, its caretaker manager’s answer was curt: “We are not really keen to collaborate with others. We prefer to mind our own business”.
It remains to be seen how the website can deliver on its plans to become a professionally-run commercial outfit, with only a select few of such websites able to generate enough advertising and subscription revenue to hire journalists and other backroom staff. Temasek Review is still some way off from becoming the fully-fledged online newspaper a la Malaysiakini that its caretaker manager envisions it to be.
