SINGAPORE: Straits Times online beefed up, to charge fee

The Straits Times plans to charge a fee for their online edition in exchange for more online content and earlier publishing times

The Straits Times
Friday, February 25, 2005

By Michelle Heng

Regular readers of The Straits Times Interactive (STI), the online edition of this newspaper, will want to take note of March 15.

That is when the 10-year-old free-access website will become a paid site, joining the ranks of the websites of newspapers such as The Times of London and the Wall Street Journal.

A subscription will cost $72 for six months, or $12 a month; group subscription rates with discounts are also available.

Now that readers have to pay, more content than is now available will be put online, and earlier each day.

Explaining the change, the managing editor of Singapore Press Holdings' English and Malay Newspapers Division, Mr Patrick Daniel, said: 'We believe that we have a good and valuable product that users will be prepared to pay for.

'It's also not a tenable business model to charge for the print edition, and not for the online edition.'

The content will be beefed up in these areas:

All news reports from Life! and LifeStyle on Sundays will go online along with all news reports from other sections, an improvement from the limited Life! and LifeStyle reports now online.

Money reports will be available from 6am, along with other news, instead of only after 6pm.

The two weekly extras that come with The Straits Times - the health magazine Mind Your Body and fashion magazine Urban - which are not online now, will be made available to subscribers.

The tech magazine Digital Life will go online from 6am on Tuesday - the same day its print edition goes out with the newspaper - instead of late on Wednesday.

All users will be able to browse the beefed-up edition from March 1 to 14 and sign up if they wish.

STI began asking readers to register their personal particulars from October last year and, so far, over 280,000 have done so.

By charging for access, STI hopes to attract Singaporeans who are working or studying overseas, as well as those who prefer getting their news online, said Mr Daniel.

SPH is also relaunching its AsiaOne.com portal to carry a selection of news from its stable of newspapers. The site will remain free.

Outside Singapore, a growing number of news websites have begun charging for access.

The websites of CNN and the BBC are still free, but newspapers such as The Times and The Telegraph in Britain, The Wall Street Journal in the United States, and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong are among those which charge.

Date Posted: 2/25/2005