Last week, Life & Times went broadsheet for five days. The occasion? The growth of Wonda Premium coffee and its BIG presence in the market. The return to broadsheet was a blast from our past. Samantha Joseph traces the NST’s history with newspaper formats
THE New Straits Times had its beginnings at the hands of Robert Carr Woods, a writer and entrepreneur who published the Straits Times and Singapore Journal Of Commerce with a hand-crank printing Press in a warehouse in Commercial Square, Singapore. The first edition made its appearance on July 15, 1845. It was a Tuesday. The weekly newspaper had a circulation of 100 copies.
In 1858, its name was changed to Daily Times and was published as a daily evening paper. Back in those days, there were morning, afternoon and evening papers. The latter two were targeted at commuters and workers but have since fallen out of favour.
In 1869, the newspaper facilities were destroyed in a fire but it didn’t miss a single issue. The Sunday Times was launched in December 1931, by Alexander William Still, who had taken over the management of the Straits Times. This new edition successfully grossed a circulation of 10,000, and Still went on to enlarge the printing plant and purchase the first rotary printing machine housed in its premises at Cecil Street, Singapore.
When war broke out, the printing of the Straits Times was interrupted. The last edition was a one-page tabloid printed on Feb 14, 1942, warning of the Japanese invasion. After the British surrendered to the Japanese, the Straits Times was known as The Shonan Times and The Syonan Shimbun.
Republication came when the British returned after the war and the Straits Times saw itself published as a morning paper in September 1945. In 1952, the company took over the Malay Mail, then a four-page afternoon paper.
The separation of Singapore from the Federation Of Malaya in 1965 saw the formation of The Straits Times Malaysia, eventually established in 1974 as the New Straits Times of today.
In 1995, New Straits Times launched the Life&Times pullout, separating its lifestyle section from the main paper. Life&Times came out in small format in 2004, a precursor to the overhaul of the newspaper that would lead it to take on its current compact form.
Indeed, the New Straits Times has had a riveting run, from its conception by an Englishman in Singapore, to its role as witness to milestones like the formation of our nation, but it has maintained its personality despite the change from broadsheet to compact format.
MODERNITY TALKING
Modernisation has wrought plenty of changes to publishing life.
“Computerisation, which began in mid-1976, would change the way we worked,” says Aziz Hassan, former news editor and manager at NSTP . “It only affected Balai Berita then and the system was for the inputting and sub-editing of stories. It didn’t change the way we looked for stories or wrote them.”
The days of writing an article directly on a computer were yet to come. “At that time, we typed our stories on an electric typewriter which was linked to personal computers for editing by the sub-editors,” says Aziz, who was at NST from 1976 to 1992. “Stories from outstation still had to be sent by telex (teleprinter) or phoned-in to someone at Balai Berita.”
RECORDING HISTORY
P.C. Shivadas, former New Straits Times group editor, agrees that things were very different then. “Those days, reporters who were sent overseas on assignment had to use a teleprinter or go to the post office to mail your text and air freight your photographs,” he says.
Shivadas, who started his career as a cadet reporter in 1963, had been through the whole publication process, until he retired in 1996. “The driving force behind publication changes had always been advertising. When advertisers started talking about colour in the early 1970s to make a greater impact on readers, colour came into play.”
It was a very interesting time for the media then. “We saw a lot of changes,” he says. “There was the formation of Malaysia, the exit of Singapore, the racial riots and Tun Mahathir’s era of industrialisation and privatisation. We were reporters who had to interview politicians and industry leaders, people who would lead the country during this time of change. We were recording history as it happened.”
The switch from broadsheet to compact was, in a sense, inevitable for the New Straits Times. “There were certain factors we had to consider,” says Shivadas of the change. “We had to listen to the readers, most of whom felt the broadsheet was cumbersome.”
Then there was the fact that advertising revenue was larger with a broadsheet and the idea that the stature of a broadsheet reflected the quality of the newspaper itself.
QUALITY PEOPLE, QUALITY PAPER
The newsroom environment was different then too, as Balai Berita was populated with what Tan Sri Dr Mohd Munir Abdul Majid, chairman of the Asean Business Advisory Council Malaysia, CIMB Asean Research Institute and Bank Muamalat, calls “giants of characters”.
“We had some really excellent journalists then,” says Munir who was at NST from 1978 to 1986 and served as group editor. He talks about Adibah Amin, Halina Todd, Supriya Singh, Rehman Rashid, Kee Thuan Chye, Zainah Anwar (who went on to found Sisters In Islam) and Johan Bagley Abdullah who wrote a column for The New Sunday Times called Johan’s Bag Of Marbles. Then there was former group editor Tan Sri Lee Siew Yee and Nadarajah Arumugam Pillai, editor of New Sunday Times whom they used to call The Incredible Sulk, because he never smiled.
“Essentially, my most memorable experiences are about the people there.”
Back in those days, it was general assumption that tabloid papers were unquestionably associated with sensationalism and a lack of depth.
“If you look at broadsheet versus tabloid today, it doesn’t necessarily follow that broadsheet is high quality and tabloid is low quality. It’s a question of quality of content,” says Munir.
As an example, he points out The Wall Street Journal and The Sun newspaper in England, both printed in tabloid format. The front page of WSJ presents a much more serious image while The Sun plasters large, page-consuming photographs and scandalous headlines across its first page.
“What is more critical is the layout and the content,” he concludes.