An average reader of Singapore’s biggest paper, The Straits Times (ST), spends 40 minutes a day reading it according to its 2005 readership survey. In 1998, it was 45 minutes.
This battle for its reader’s time is why ST launched the first of its three re-designs in the last 10 years. As its ex-editor Mr Leslie Fong then said:
The competition is not just against other media or information providers
but also, increasingly, for your time.
(The Straits Times, 22 Mar 1998 )
While one way is to shorten stories, another is to tell them in a language that fits these characteristics — visuals. This is why the print media in Singapore including newspapers like ST turn to page layout, information graphics, or cartoons.
These practices need to be documented and discussed because if visuals is the new text then it’s time we raise our understanding of it. This blog serves to fill the dearth of this dialogue in Singapore by examining how local magazines and newspapers are using visuals to better serve its readers.
\\\ About the paginator — Justin Zhuang
The blog began as an assignment for COM412: Advanced Writing Workshop aka Journalism Imagined, a course I am taking as a final-year journalism student in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.
That’s me, always contemplative with my cup of teh.
For a short while, I worked as a paginator — someone who executes a designer’s layout of a news page — in The Straits Times and I also co-headed the redesign of my campus newspaper, The Nanyang Chronicle.
The visual work aside, I also do a fair bit of writing about the Singapore city — its politics, history, culture and people. Upon entering the university, I began writing for The Nanyang Chronicle and served as its Opinions Editor in 2006. A year later, jaded of this city, I left for a semester on exchange in the USA at the University of Maryland but got hit with a major bout of homesickness instead. I holed myself in the Singapore section of the library (just two shelves), and I found myself seeing this city with new eyes.
Upon my return, I tried to share this vision by organising Singaplural, a public film screening of student films to understand alternative perspectives of this city. A year later, I helped set up the WKWSCI Showcase aka outsight, a visual showcase for student works in school. Currently, I am working on my final-year project, Reclaim Land, an illustrated journalism feature about the contest for space in this city. I also write occasionally for an independent student newspaper, The Enquirer.
If you like to drop me a line, do so at justinzhuang@gmail.com or see my personal site and portfolio at just rambling.
