3 days ago
From print to podcasts, The Straits Times has been a 180-year ritual
The newspaper is a city's start to the day, though now, in its digital form, it is an all-day companion, says the writer.
It is 1849 and Moby-Dick is yet to be published and construction of the Eiffel Tower is yet to begin. The modern zipper has not been invented and neither has colour photography. The Washington Post does not exist nor does The Wall Street Journal. But The Straits Times is already four years old and in its pages you can find all manner of things.
Bayonets for sale. Horsehair petticoats. Punkas. Gunpowder. If you're not interested in such items, you can read dispatches from New York, the long, formal letters written to the editor, or the birth of a child under the quaint subhead of Domestic Occurrence.
The first newspapers arrived around the 17th century and in time most lands had their version of a Dispatch, Courier, Inquirer, Examiner, Advertiser, Tribune, Gazette, Herald, Chronicle and Post. We are simply The Straits Times. In 1845, the year Elizabeth Barrett received her first love letter from a fellow poet named Robert Browning – 'I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett', it began – we started our own relationship with this city.
The playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death Of A Salesman, said that 'a good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself'. Very quietly, of course. This conversation began at dawn, for the newspaper is a city's start to the day, though now, in its digital form, it is an all-day companion.
The newspaper, often trying to be all things to all people, glues us all. As people unwrap – or click on – the pages, they are in fact wrapping themselves in the city. The writer Alain de Botton put it neatly: 'To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.'
Families snatch sections and fold themselves into corners of rooms. News is opened, Sports rifled through, Business examined. Bylines become ignored or turn into trusted friends, a case of two strangers intimately connected by words. Once a taxi driver berated me on discovering that I had not read the latest
Sumiko Tan column .
The Straits Times has been a 180-year ritual and for readers, through time, everything must be in the right place. When the box scores were removed from Sports, letters of protest followed. When a masthead font is changed, a grumble rises. As if one's morning tea has been fiddled with.
In the beginning The Straits Times' front page was crammed with wordy advertisements and to surf through the paper's long history is to be met with all manner of curiosities. On Jan 20, 1920, a new stock of Colt automatic pistols was announced. In 1954, a headline shouted 'Podgy stockbroker kept his mistresses on the loot from phantom oil'.
On one corner of the front page was a box titled The Law Of Storms which requires explanation. 'The Editor of The Straits Times,' it was written, 'will feel greatly obliged by Captains of Vessels furnishing him with particulars (extracted from the Ship's Log, including observations of Barometer and Thermometer) of occurrences of typhoons or hurricanes in the China Seas; more especially for notices of typhoons from the Bashee Group northwards to Chusan or Shantung.'
The Straits Times was read, then perhaps carried on a bus where it was bent and pleated, and then at day's end probably used to swat flies. A newspaper has historically had many uses. It lines drawers but is also cut and framed and put behind glass, as May and Colin Schooling did with the story on Joseph going to train in America.
Phil Graham, the great publisher of The Washington Post, once told Newsweek correspondents, 'So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.'
The Straits Times did this every day, becoming a city's habit and its reassurance. Now we bookmark pages on our phone, then the page of a particular edition was occasionally kept and forgotten. In the insides of old cupboards we often find these clippings after our parents pass. It tells us what they cared about, these pages their precious written proof of extraordinary days.
The Straits Times has been a citizen's inheritance. Parents read it and children in time picked it up or downloaded its app. A bit like trying on your father's shoes. It became a first introduction to Singapore, telling stories of its moods, its grievances, its cosy corners, its grimy nooks.
Reporters have wandered the ports of this city, the riot-strewn streets, the circus tents, the sporting fields. Like those the paper has reported on, it is itself fallible. There are more opinions of a paper than there are those within it. Yet everything has been done in the service of the reader. It is why The Straits Times has overseas correspondents in 11 nations. In time the world has become our beat.
But primarily Singapore is our world and how far Singapore has come and who Singaporeans are as a people have always been recorded in headlines, photographs, illustrations, videos and graphs. Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, means The Mirror and like it this paper reflects how Singaporeans have lived, stumbled, improved and changed as a society. In October 1972, a front-page headline read: 'It's dearer after two: Govt acts to cut down size of families'. By January 2013 the shift was clear: 'The big push for more babies' insisted the front page.
The Straits Times has been this city's voice, its explainer of the world, its guide, its informant and connective tissue. How many things do you have in common with your great-great-great-grandfather? This paper might be one. It has outlasted cinema halls, parks, roads, and is as intrinsically local as a curry puff or an HDB building. It is loved and loathed and people shut doors on reporters even as they recognise them as allies of a sort. After all, as Gay Talese wrote in The Kingdom And The Power, his history of The New York Times: 'News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all.'
This paper has proclaimed war, announced freedom and declared independence. It has also noted that an 'Enraged buffalo falls to six police bullets'. From news on Mahatma Gandhi's assassination trial to the winning goal scored by a school footballer, we have found room for the global saint and the local hero. Inside its pages births have been listed, deaths catalogued, weddings announced and jobs advertised. One might say a nation lives and loves and works in its newspaper pages.
In a shaken-up media world, bruised mostly by a digital revolution which ensures news – not necessarily verified or fairly presented – is available 24 hours on the phone, over 2,500 newspapers have closed in the United States since 2005. The Straits Times has endured yet takes nothing for granted. As a city's landscape alters and its citizens' lives change, so have our designs, our ambition, our sections, our ideas. To stay relevant is to adapt.
When this paper began, typewriters had not been invented. Now we don't use them any more. Old journalists could adroitly change a ribbon and impale rejected stories on a metal spike (thus the term 'spiking a story'). Their inheritors design magical graphics and can film and edit on their phones in a flash.
The paper can be found at your doorway and in neat piles on supermarket shelves but it's also online and in the digital universe of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and LinkedIn. News no longer rides on a solitary vehicle. Old-timers still like to feel the actual paper. But everything alters, even the sound of newspapers: once it was only a rustle, now the digital 'ting' is an alert to a new story on the phone.
And so The Straits Times comes to your home but also to your phone. We're happy to meet you wherever you go and however you find information. If your world is Instagram, The Straits Times will see you there. If you prefer the app, then through myST you can personalise your newsfeed.
The written word remains sacred but the newspaper world has expanded that idea. News is expressed digitally through podcasts, videos, graphics or complex, cutting-edge interactives, whether it's a ride through the
100 years of the Johor-Singapore Causeway or how a person on a wheelchair
can navigate the MRT . The boundaries of creativity shift every day.
'Live' blogs follow events as they unfold and
during the 2025 General Election , The Straits Times often sent three reporters to a rally. One to write for the newspaper, two to make videos. Perhaps one for Instagram and the other for TikTok. No one, the newspaper understands, sees the world the same way, through the same medium and for the same length of time.
The traditional and the modern are intertwined. The old-fashioned, door-knocking journalism that defined newspapers remains but it is bolstered by revolutionised newsrooms where entire teams are devoted to breaking news. But nothing works at a single speed. Reports on a disaster may arrive on the website in seconds, but an imaginative construction of Max Maeder's waterworld might require nine months.
But irrespective of form and tools, we know what is expected of us. One hundred and eighty years is a privilege and a weight. Tastes alter and so does a nation's pulse. It is our job to have a sensitive, intelligent, reliable finger on it. When we don't meet a high standard, we expect you to tell us. Of course, we cannot guarantee we will always get it right, but there are some things we can say for certain. Like a repeat of the front page of the very first edition of The Straits Times on July 15, 1845, is unlikely.
It noted, among other things, that two milch goats were for sale. They were, it was boasted, in excellent condition.
