monoceros blogsThe online edition of The Straits Times won't be free for much longer. They're planning to charge online users $15 a month, $72 for six months, or $120 for a year.
They believe they have a "good and valuable" product that people will want to pay for. Well, I'm certainly not one of such people. Yes, I read The Straits Times because I feel closer to home when I read about what's going on in Singapore. But paying fees for news online is where I draw the line. Other online editions of newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times are free. Certain articles in the archives of the NYTimes require fees, but they only cease to be free after a certain amount of time. Everything else is FOC as long as you're a regular reader.
I was disappointed when they first reduced the number of Life! articles online. They also reduced the seven-day archive to a three-day one. What was the purpose? To induce readers to buy the print edition? Then I got a little more peeved when STI required registration last year (probably part of the plan to charge readers once they found out how many folks read STI; do they actually believe number of readers = number of people who will pay to read?), so I adopted the widely available user name and password: stisucks. Now, I'll just stop reading it altogether. Not that anyone from the SPH company would care about the loss of one reader though; after all, a large number of people would supposedly pay to read this "good and valuable product."
Oh, and a final word on STI. In the email informing me about the new fees, a rather remarkable sentence reads:
"You will want to know whether you will get anything more, now that you have to pay. The answer is yes."
They want readers to pay and this is the quality of writing they deliver?
Posted by Monoceros at February 24, 2005 12:30 AMi got the same email... and i was/am just as annoyed.
ok, that really sucks. The SPH management is mad! Not that it's relevant to me, but i definitely wouldn't pay for it if i were living overseas. Not when i have papers like The Guardian and The NY Times available to me free! And anyway, Home News is not all that exciting and takes up only a small portion of the paper.
I doubt this business model is going to work going by our reactions!
Posted by: dsd at February 24, 2005 7:46 PMI was more like "Huh, like that also want to charge!" Its not as if they are some international newspaper. In fact, I deleted the mail and never thought more about it becoz I thot it was such a silly business move on their part!
Posted by: fatgirl at February 25, 2005 2:01 PMWhat to do. I wonder how many people will actually pay for it. They've already got the monopoly in Singapore, what more do they want?
Posted by: monoceros at February 25, 2005 7:25 PMboycott? That's what I'll do too... not paying!
Posted by: Bunny at March 1, 2005 12:02 AM