MY FIRST presentation at a Commonwealth Press Union event was at the Cape Town conference two years ago. My topic at the time was on how Singapore Press Holdings was putting its newspapers online. The hat I was wearing then was editor of The Straits Times Interactive. A lot has changed in 24 months.
As Professor Jamaludin indicated, I moved to the Foreign Desk earlier this year and in two months time will move again. I will become editor of the Business section of The Straits Times, which is the flagship of the Singapore Press Holdings group.
Since I kick-started The Straits Times Interactive at a time when the Internet had just begun taking the world by storm, and I will take over the Business section when storm clouds are hanging heavy over the region, I can only conclude that my boss seems intent on allowing me to benefit from an ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
But one man's curse can be a journalist's dream.
These are interesting times for the industry. The three players - the press, radio and television - have been joined by a fourth, the Internet. If it is not already available in your country or city, it will be soon. And even if it isnıt, you can always open an account with an Internet Service Provider in the nearest city or country - since all that you really need are a personal computer, a piece of hardware called a modem and a decent telephone line. In fact, I can assure those of you who do not have an Internet service provider in your country that there are already some people in your cities who know how to overcome this deficiency and are using the World Wide Web. This happened in Singapore.
These are interesting times for another reason too. The future for Singapore Press Holdings is not the same today as it was when I was in Cape Town. For the first time in a long, long while, the growth in our revenues are on a downward slope.
The group has moved swiftly to protect the bottom line. All executives have taken a 2% pay cut, perks have been slashed, everyone, including our executive director, travels in economy class, overseas training has been put on hold, and I nearly did not make it here, so strict has the organisation become about expenditures. And this is even before the economic turmoil has begun to really bite into our profits.
So you can see that I have a deep vested interest in helping my organisation keep costs down. Iım hoping that this will stave off any more pay and perk cuts!
But the need for this has always been there. The latest annual WAN survey of World Press Trends showed that the market share of advertising won by newspapers is down almost everywhere. In only 11 countries do newspapers have more than 50 per cent of the advertising. And in eight of them - Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, India, Mongolia and Singapore - the share has diminished since 1993.
Thankfully, "Information Technology" - which used to be a backroom operation understood and managed only by technical staff - has become in many ways easier to understand and use by non-technical people who now wield it as a cost-savings productivity tool. And it is precisely these people, the journalists, in our newsrooms who have been producing the ideas on how to use IT effectively in their work. Which is why I am here. Despite the rather fanciful title listed beside my name on your CPU programme, Editorial Systems Support Unit chief - I am not an "Information Technology" man. I do not have a computer background. My entire experience in my newspaper group has been as a reporter and editor.
And my talk today is NOT about how you should spend obscene
amounts of money so that your newsroom will look like the bridge of
the Star Trek. It IS about our experience in trying to stay ahead of the pack with just a little adjustment to the way we think and work.
By the end of this session, I hope to have shown, among other things:
how cheap it was to bring our Prime Minister home (or at least his pictures) and what long-term implications that experience has for the company
how we plan to gain new audiences around the globe at other organisations' expense
and how we have given our news editors and reporters new sources of material to fill their pages or flesh out their reports.
But I also hope, at the end of this session, to persuade you that technology should not be left to the so-called Information
Technology Department or systems specialists.
My examples today focus on The Straits Times, flagship of the Singapore Press Holdings group. But they are applicable to all our group's papers.
The newsroom of The Straits Times is not very different from any other newspaper. Our stories, pictures and graphics flow in from a variety of sources. And, like you, we communicate with our "suppliers", i.e. journalists, freelancers, wire agencies, using different techniques.
SLASHING COSTS
The Straits Times sends reporters and photographers into the field locally and abroad all the time. In addition, we have nine bureaus overseas. And two Off-shore Editorial Units - the Sydney office consisting of a full-time team of Australian sub-editors - and the Manila office supplementing the art and infographics output of our Singapore-based team.
One of the outcomes of this is whopping telephone bills.
Let me digress a little: When I joined The Straits Times close to a quarter of a century ago, reporters in the field, filing close to deadline, used to phone in their reports. At first, fellow journalists used to take their calls and type up their reports for them. Rather than continue to treat experienced journalists as expensive stenographers, we then decided to hire "transcribers", non-journalists whose job was to stand by for such calls. In between, we made them do other work, such as transcribe radio and TV news bulletins, or follow our team to parliament and take down all proccedings, and so on.
The spread of facsimile machines - faxes - helped a little. But though speedier in delivering reports to our doorstep, they suffered two major disadvantages: firstly, the reports still needed to be typed into our computer system by our transcribers, and secondly, the quality of the incoming fax was often so bad that we had to call our reporters in the field and ask them to clarify the garbled text.
Add to these the IDD costs when sending faxes overseas and the paper costs, and so on, and you can see that fax machines will soon go the way of the manual typewriter.
With the arrival of the Internet and email, things began looking a lot rosier. Today, our reporters in the field and from our overseas bureaus can chose to file their reports directly into our computer system through a special modem connection, or through email which we then pick up and transfer to our main system in a simple two-step "Save file" and "Drag and drop" procedure.
Since email involves calls only to the Internet Service Provider in the sender and receipientıs respective countries, there is no IDD charge, just local call charges.
To give you an idea of how dramatic the savings have been for us, here are some figures:
FAX - Facsimile machines transfer data at a rate of 9.6 kbps. They require costly IDD connections.
Remote Access - Direct modem to modem connections have a data rate transfer of 9.6 kbps as well. They too need IDD connections.
email can be sent and received at 56 kbps or faster. On top of that, email is billed at only local call rates.
The advantages of email over the two other methods of data transfer become even more pronounced when it comes to sending and receiving photographs.
Facsimile machines are useless for sending photographs or infographics. And modem to modem connections are not only slow, they are unreliable. This adds to the cost of transfer. For example, regular checks have shown us that the failure rate for modem to modem transmissions is as high as 30%. Which means that roughly one in three pictures may need to be re-sent. At IDD rates.
And so our outstation photographers turned to the Internet and email. They began sending us photographs as attachments in email. The process was: They would take pictures, develop the negatives and then use a device - a Nikon Coolscan - to capture the appropriate images from the negative and transfer these to a computer laptop. Then, using the laptop and an ordinary phone line, they would send us these images as attachments to email notes.
Although far less expensive than sending by direct modem to modem connection, the email method had one major setback. Whenever we accessed our email account to get the pictures sent by a photographer, the connection would get jammed as our email software tried to collect ALL the pictures in the batch before allowing us to see even ONE. Which meant that we were only substituting high cost with high frustration.
Finally, one photographer, Tay Kay Chin, who often raised eyebrows in the newsroom because of his penchant for questioning the status quo, provided the neatest solution to date. Turning away from modem to modem transmission and disdaining email, he used a newer method - File Transfer Protocol (FTP), a fancy name for the simple procedure of electronically sending or receiving (downloading) data.
Simply put, instead of sending the captured images on his laptop to us via email, he set up an Internet website and then sent his images there. We in the newsroom then called up the website just as we would any ordinary website and viewed in miniature form - or "thumbnail" format - all the pictures he was offering. After identifying the ones we wanted, we then downloaded just those images to our newsroom computers. The process was fast - because he could upload the pictures to the website at the fastest speed available wherever he was at the moment, and we could download it at up to 128 kbps or even 10 MBps, and also because we were accepting only the desired images.
The beauty of this FTP method can be seen from what happened when Kay Chin travelled to the United States and Chile recently in a group accompanying Singaporeıs Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. He sent home our Prime Ministerıs pictures via FTP.
During the four-day US section of the trip, he sent us 22 pictures totalling 7.9 MB. On the three-day Chile leg, he sent 33 pictures totalling 27.7 MB.
Later, on his return, we did a calculation of how much these pictures would have cost us under different methods of transmission.
Taking into account the hotel IDD charges in the USA and Chile, it would have cost The Straits Times $3,568.50 (Singapore dollars) had Kay Chin sent those pictures using the modem to modem method.
The cost using the FTP method: $161.20.
Not surprisingly, we have begun training all our photographers to use this system. Some of you are already ahead of us. For example, I believe The Star newspaper in Malaysia - which has an enviable reputation for being on the cutting edge in photojournalism technology in the region - has been employing this method.
FTP has opened a new door for us. It means that we now have an opportunity to set up picture-swapping arrangements with other publications overseas at negligible cost to both sides.
EXPANDING REACH
Cutting costs is an important goal. But the Internet has also enabled us to fulfil another goal: Improving our name recognition. We have put all our newspapers on the Internet - giving readers around the globe same day access to all our published reports. Now, we are moving to a new phase.
A short while ago, CNN contacted us and asked for our cooperation in providing material for its CNN This Morning breakfast show. In return, the show will boost what the Americans call our ³brand recognition² factor in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Presumably, listeners in these areas will then turn to our newspaper on the web for the complete version of the reports televised during the CNN show. For CNN, the material is free. The cost to us is in having someone select and then transmit, via the Internet, a few reports each day to CNN. We are now discussing similar arrangements with other international media organisations.
RAISING QUALITY
But to keep such international audiences interested in our newspapers, and in fact, to keep our circulation growing, we have to keep raising the quality of our titles. Just as the Internet has enabled us to reach new audiences through our World Wide Web newspapers, it has also enabled our local readers to access news publications based in other countries. They can then compare the quality of the reporting, the attractiveness of the presentations, the comprehensiveness of our content.
I can assure you that people seem quicker to point out the deficiencies of your Internet publication than your print edition. The Straits Times Interactive has gone from 1.2 million hits a month when we launched it in 1995 to more than 10 million a month today. In tandem with this has come a host of complaints and suggestions on how we can do a better job.
In some cases, people will not wait for newspapers. For example, when the Ken Starr report on President Bill Clintonıs alleged impeachable offences was released to the public on September 11, 1998, some news organisations put the entire document on the web immediately. CNN , which did this, recorded an incredible 34.3 million page impressions that day - twice its daily average.
In addition to using the Internet to reach overseas audiences, we also have turned to it increasingly to strengthen our print offerings.
Our journalists now routinely scour the World Wide Web for, among other things:
developments which are newsworthy events
reports by major governmental or non-governmental organisations, and
news stories by online newspapers which are worth carrying in our print editions.
In addition, we have begun to capitalise on the low-cost transmission capablities of the Internet to create new linkages with potential partners in news gathering.
For example: The Straits Times is in the midst of discussions on sharing reports with six other newspapers in the region. If successful, this will lead to each of us being able to view what the others are going to publish the next day and then to carry the same stories in our individual newspapers simultaneously.
This will enhance our regional coverage tremendously and at no extra cost other than local call charges to each of our local Internet Service Providers. In effect, we would have established an Asean news agency of sorts.
CONCLUSION
I hope these examples have been interesting and useful to at least some of you. Given the composition of the membership of the Commonwealth Press Union, many of you must be much higher on the learning curve than we are.
Still, I would like to make an appeal to all of you: Be flexible and reward your rebels. Some of the things that I have mentioned in this talk came about because some of my colleagues refused to accept the status quo.
But they have not always been encouraged.
For example, when our photographer Tay Kay Chin returned from the USA, having saved the newspaper more than $3,000 in transmission costs, he thought it would allow him to claim the US$150 cost of laundering his clothes while he was away. The response: No.
If you want to be on the cutting edge, you need to keep your Tay Kay Chins happy. Reward them by giving them more opportunities to advise you on how to improve your newsroom's productivity. You won't regret it.
Paul Jansen is business editor of The Straits Times. He presented this paper at the Commonwealth Editors' Forum in Penang on Oct 22, 1998 under the title "Slashing Costs, Expanding Sources, Raising Quality - One Organisation's Battle to Enslave Technology for the Newsroom".
