By: Clement Mesenas, Commentary Editor
First published: 22 September 04, TODAY

And so it has come to pass. Media liberalisation, introduced four years ago to stimulate competition in the industry, has left the protagonists bloodied and happy to return to a sort of status quo.

TV is back within the ambit of MediaCorp but the newspaper sector has spawned a new independent product that has clawed its way into securing a portion of the print advertisement market.

Against the odds, TODAY has survived.

Journalists, being the romantic idealists that most of them are, would rather the competition rage on. And may the best company win the cake and take it all.

But commercial considerations dictate otherwise. Singapore has been deemed too small for two television players and with the TV advertisement market estimated at $200 million a year, the business gurus may well be right.

But the advertising dollars to be earned from the newspaper publishing market amount to $600 million annually and that certainly is big enough for two English-language morning dailies, The Straits Times and Today, and who knows, perhaps a third player as well.

But Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), the parent of the 158-year-old The Straits Times, has always been loathe to allow the entry of any newcomer and has ensured its continued success by employing the business strategy of covering all bases.

This meant making sure that it was the sole purveyor of a morning broadsheet, an afternoon tabloid, Sunday newspapers and a business daily.

In the area of newspaper publishing, SPH has built itself over the decades to become a monolithic empire.

Erstwhile competition before TODAY did not last the distance.

Newcomers either lacked financial stamina or the dexterity required in a field
dominated by a vastly-experienced incumbent.

Hence, TODAY's survival is not unremarkable. And this is no self-congratulatory exercise.

No other newspaper before TODAY seems to have had the financial muscle or
the editorial and marketing wherewithal to sustain a reasonable campaign to capture a part of the print advertisement pie.

More importantly, what spelt the life or death of a newspaper here is its ability to hire and, more vitally, retain trained staff.

TODAY has had its share of this difficulty from the time the plan to launch the newspaper became clear four years ago.

To be sure, many of the senior staff in the editorial and other departments had at some time or another in their careers served in SPH.

But it was the younger staff, many fresh from university, who helped bring about the creation of TODAY- a new kind of newspaper that is appreciated by the reading public as a genuinely alternative product to The Straits Times.

And many of the younger journalists have earned their spurs to become commendable practitioners, able to hold their own against their more experienced counterparts in the SPH stable.

They could be said to have played their part in justifying the investors' confidence in putting out close to $50 million - a considerable sum which was needed to create from scratch the infrastructure needed for a newspaper operation, from the editorial to the printing, marketing and circulation departments.

And at the same time, fob off the spoiler strategies of Streats, launched by SPH to stymie the efforts of TODAY.

Overall, TODAY has progressed, despite not having its own printing plant and the economies of scale that a daily like Streats would enjoy, operating under the umbrella of a newspaper group: From $18.2 million in FY2002, Today's losses have declined to under $10 million for FY2004.

And major investor MediaCorp has been steadfast in providing resources and
support to TODAY via mass media platforms.

With each year, TODAY not only grew stronger but implanted in the minds of business leaders that there was room for another English morning daily.

Now there's a definite glow at the end of the tunnel.

Advertisement sales are rising, due in no small measure to the creative efforts of the advertisement sales force and will continue to rise as the festive season approaches.

TODAY has been projected to break even by the end of this financial year.

The rationalisation of the advertising market will help TODAY secure the $50 million annually in sales revenue, or less than 10 per cent of the national advertising pie for the print market, needed to break even.

Securing anything beyond this would reap profits for TODAY which reaches,
through a selective distribution network, the PMEBs and residents of condos and homes - people with better purchasing power and the kind of market that advertisers want to reach out to.

The figures may appear simplistic, but SPH's acquisition of 40 per cent of TODAY for $19.2 million, after years of trying to eliminate what might be described as a pesky irritant, is proof enough that the Goliath has accepted that it has met a worthy match in this probable David.

Said SPH CEO Alan Chan: "We will watch TODAY very, very carefully from a profitability viewpoint, as well as from how much of the cake it is taking from us."

More important, perhaps, is how TODAY will continue to nurture the influence and regard it has with the public, business decision-makers and government officials.

MediaCorp Group CEO Ernest Wong underscored the growing acceptance of tabloid-size newspapers tailored for busy executives on the move. "I have been involved in TODAY's operations right from the start and I am happy to note that it has gained ... wide acceptance. It is now the second most widely circulated paper. The morning readership in a cosmopolitan city like Singapore is big enough for two mainstream newspapers ..."

Thankfully, it will carry on with its ground-breaking style, unfettered by the SPH stake.

"TODAY's business model - that of the compact-format newspaper that is distributed free to the target audience that advertisers most want to reach is here to stay," said its editor-in-chief, Mr Mano Sabnani, who is also CEO of MediaCorp Press, the newspaper's parent.

And MediaCorp will continue to exercise "management, board and editorial
control".

But that is not the end of the story.

The newspaper's readers who now number over 550,000 daily - and some of
them are subscribers to the Straits Times, too - say it is to TODAY that they turn to first thing in the morning, to get their daily fix of news and views that are not only important but also thought-provoking.

The challenge is for TODAY to further raise its editorial standards - through tight, incisive news reporting and its ability to explain complex issues simply - in the months ahead.

It's a challenge to be relished as the media battle in the newspaper business moves into Round Two.