Today, the fourth of July, marks my last day as a journalist with SPH Media.
I will be returning my company laptop and office pass before heading into retirement.
It’s been 44 years and four months since I joined, and I shall be forever grateful for the many opportunities that came my way.
Journalism has been a profession close to my heart since 1976 when, as a 19-year-old, I watched All the President’s Men on the big screen.
The movie plunged me into the world of American journalism as I watched investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman respectively, unravel the true story of the Watergate scandal.
The story ran much deeper than at first glance.
Five burglars had been arrested and appeared in court, and it soon became clear that they were members of a group associated with US President Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign.
They had broken into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Complex in Washington DC and planted listening devices.
Woodward and Bernstein chased leads provided by a source called “Deep Throat”, unearthing damning details that were published in the Washington Post. Nixon was eventually forced to resign.
Young and impressionable, I, too, wanted to make a difference, and several years later applied to join The Straits Times (ST).
A written test was followed by a field assignment and an anxious one-month wait.
Then the letter that would change my life arrived – albeit late.
On March 2 1981, a despatch rider showed up at my home bearing my letter of appointment.
But it was already past 11am and I was to have had a meeting with the ST editor at 10am that day.
It was customary in those days for all the new hires to have an introductory meeting with the editor on the first day, before starting work.
I rushed to Times House in Kim Seng Road, near River Valley Road, expecting the worst. The editor was not around but he had left a clear message for me: If this was my attitude on the first day of work, then I need not bother showing up anymore.
The administrative glitch was later explained to him and I was able to embark peacefully on my journalistic career.
My plan was to learn the ropes on the Sports desk for a year or two, then transfer to the News desk to do crime and investigative reporting.
But within a year of my joining, Mr SR Nathan, later to become Singapore’s sixth President, arrived at Times House.
He left as permanent secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to become Executive Chairman of the Straits Times Press (STP) which also produced New Nation, The Business Times (BT) and Berita Harian.
It was an uneasy and uncertain time for management and journalists in Times House. Most saw it as the start of direct government intervention in the media. I felt it was not the time to be asking for a move to become an investigative reporter.
In his memoirs, Mr Nathan devoted an entire chapter – Entering the newspaper world – to his time in Times House.
This sentence in particular, struck me when I read it years later.
“Everyone wanted to be a Woodward or a Bernstein,” Mr Nathan noted in his memoirs, An Unexpected Journey.
Earlier in the chapter he recounted: “As I walked to the door of his office, the prime minister (Mr Lee Kuan Yew) called me back. I remember his words: “Nathan – I am giving you the Straits Times. It has 150 years of history. It has been a good paper. It is like a bowl of china. If you break it, I can piece it together. But it will never be the same again. Try not to destroy it.”
Mr Nathan spent six years in Times House. During that time, there were two mergers in the newspaper industry.
In 1983, a rival newspaper company, Singapore News and Publications Limited (SNPL), was formed. It brought about a major consolidation of the Chinese newspapers, with the new company being given a licence to publish an English daily, the Singapore Monitor.
As part of the restructure, New Nation, an afternoon tabloid, was closed and STP and was given a licence to publish a Chinese newspaper, Shin Min Daily News. The closure of New Nation led to a loss of jobs.
Then another merger a year later.
To save on costs, STP, Times Publishing and SNPL merged and Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), a public listed company, was born in 1984. More than 100 journalists, some wearing black armbands and others carrying placards, stood in the rain during lunch hour at Times House to protest against the proposed merger. “Competition is good for Singapore,” they argued in one of their banners.
The Singapore Monitor folded the following year due to financial constraints. Once again, journalists were retrenched, though some were taken back by ST and BT.
Over the years, other newspapers came and went – projecteyeball, Streats, the bilingual My Paper and the Chinese language Lianhe Wanbao. TV stations were started and closed before the challenge of radio was taken on.
Mr Nathan was replaced some time later by Mr Lim Kim San, a formidable no-nonsense former minister who had built up public housing after Singapore’s independence.
Under Mr Lim’s leadership, SPH pivoted to properties to shore up earnings.
With the passage of time, it was business as usual at Times House where the newspapers were also printed and distributed. If you hung around till ST went to print past midnight, you could see it coming off the presses with your story in it – literally hot off the press. It was at Times House that I met my wife, fellow journalist Chitra Rajaram. Times House was later sold to a condominium developer.
I did eventually move to other desks – News, Sunday Times and Section Two (now called Life!) – before returning to Sports.
Reporting was fun. I met people from all walks of life and wrote their stories.
There were no handphones in those days. We were given pagers and used coinafons to ring the office. We used electric typewriters and carried manual ones on overseas assignments.
My starting salary was about $350 a month. Payment was in cash at the cashier’s office and the money – notes and coins – came in little brown envelopes.
After 10 years in ST, it was time to move on. I asked for a transfer to The New Paper (TNP).
Launched in 1988, TNP was not unlike New Nation, selling mainly on crime and football.
It was there that I learnt the production side of journalism – sub-editing, copyediting and page design.
It was a tough shift. We started work at 5.30am so that the afternoon tabloid could catch the lunchtime crowd.
Unlike ST, which sold largely through subscriptions, TNP was a “street paper” sold at newstands, convenience stores and MRT stations.
At its peak, it sold more then 100,000 copies a day. If the story was juicy enough, people would queue to buy the paper. We sold fewer papers on the days when it rained at lunch time.
Every day, the team had to produce an impactful cover story and design to grab the readers’ attention. And we always had to make sure our stories had a different angle or spin from what ST had.
It helped that the newsroom had many talented editors and journalists. It was a crucible of creativity.
We dabbled in quick news and info-graphics, led by an editor who encouraged out-of-the-box story ideas and who was inclined, from time to time, to test the story boundaries or OB (out of bounds) markers as we called it in the business.
Several years later, I became the Crime Desk supervisor and, in a way, achieved what I had set out to do. No Watergate-type stories though.
TNP was ahead of its time. And it was a sad day when the print version folded in 2022, a victim of the digital tsunami that swept through the media world, crippling newspapers. Subscriptions and advertising revenue plunged.
After 14 years in TNP, it was time to move again.
I had wanted to return to ST but was asked to join Tamil Murasu (TM) instead in 2006.
The newspaper was in danger of closing when SPH stepped in and bought it in 1995. It celebrates its 90th anniversary on July 6.
What was to have been a six-month secondment turned out to be a 19-year stay in TM and tabla! They were good years.
In 2021, as part of another restructure, SPH Media was formed, operating under a not-for-profit structure and receiving funding from the goverment.
The media scene has changed dramatically with the rise of digital journalism and alternative media.
During the General Election in May, mainstream and alternative media battled for eyeballs using social media, videos and podcasts.
It’s a vastly different media world from the one I stepped into all those decades ago.
I have lived through the changes. And now it’s time to move on.
