There's no shortage of news and information about anything that happens anywhere in the world.
The question now is more about which one do you trust,
which one can you trust? Which news is real?
Real meaning properly substantiated fact. Verified. Which one is reliable?
That is, to me, the biggest issue now. Trust is the key point.
And the ability of publisher to be able to be a trusted source.
That is the competitive advantage.
And that's where I think we should put our energy and investment in.
Which means a quality control of talent,
recruitment and talent retention and output.
All the experience. All the research has shown that audiences are willing to pay for quality content.
So we have to stand for that quality to make sure we're putting out content that people value.
Our challenge is not readership. What our challenge is how to grow that readership
and reach and then monetise it.
So we know where we want to go. We know why we want to do it.
Then the key question is, how are we going to do it?
We must enhance the user experience, so people keep coming back to have a good
experience and that requires investments in the product.
We will have to invest quite aggressively in our technology, ramp it up so that we can really have
best in class products.
Good user experience and also the technology that we use to get the job done to make sure that
content can flow seamlessly across platforms, so we can do our jobs more productively.
Get the content out to people in a timely, effective way.
We all know digital transformation requires huge investments,
and techies are not cheap because everybody is going digitalizing.
So the market has shifted upwards.
And if you don't pay to match the market, how are you going to attract the talent?
Those are investments. Big, long payback period.
Setting up the media academy is a huge investment in many millions.
But more importantly, investing the time and resources to implement those programmes.
Using this to also not just scale up our people,
but help develop the whole media industry,
whole ecosystem that we have in Singapore, but also around us. Bring in journalists from around
the region for some of these programmes and then form relationships and partnerships with them.
First step is we will review and revamp all our existing programmes.
Really focus on building digital skills, multimedia content, video, visual, interactive,
but also show the links between these content.
Our titles have strong international readerships.
ST, about a third of our audience comes from overseas and that's what we want to build on
through our content, but also through our events our forums, which we will
launch and do more of so that we're getting into that thought leadership space on Asian affairs.
And we will do that by working with regional and global partnerships. Now to do that, we will beef
up our bureaus which we've been investing in for the last few decades. Build that expertise.
I've mentioned the need to promote and support our vernacular media and in the process, safeguard
our cultures, our languages, our heritage. We've got good school's products which do that already.
We're going to work with community groups to form partnerships to make sure we can
get these into the hands of our community so that young people grow up experiencing
and enriching their lives by these languages, being living languages.
I started the process quite early, almost as soon as I was asked to take on this job, and yes,
we have completed a search and we'll be making an announcement within the next week or two.
So stay tuned.
They wanted to expand our audience, outreach and impact,
so audience outreach is easily measured.
That this shift is about a customer or subscriber focused
and data driven culture, which we are building up, which we have to strengthen further.
But the underlying key is really about quality.
That we will succeed only if you achieve quality. Quality of content.
Quality of user experience. Quality of audience engagement.