I've never been a big fan of STOMP. Being twenty-one, perhaps I would have been taken in by the wild array of colours and photographs on the website, or be moved by the attractive $25,000 in cash and prizes to join the MMSing talent contest. But the fact was that I wasn’t.
STOMP is The Straits Times’ foray into new media, which was started in June 2006. I was actually turned off by the website, which looked like a smorgasbord of advertisement posters. Designed for the youth crowd, it tried hard to hold the short attention spans of the wired generation with bright and cheery packaging, but turned out to be a splash of disorientated colours.
However, going beyond appearances, is STOMP all fluff and no stuff?
Some of its features include: a Star Blog section, where some of Singapore’s most popular bloggers convene to blog about certain predetermined topics, Ask ST, a hotline that promises to answer any questions a reader has under the sun, and Singapore Seen, where citizen journalists report on news and issues happening around Singapore.
As I delved into Singapore Seen, I wasn’t impressed by its contents. The news items in Singapore Seen mostly features complaints against public misbehaviour and poor customer service or trivial news that serve no purpose but to satiate a websurfer’s curiosity.
But I’m not saying it is all bad. Thanks to STOMP, people are now giving up their seats on the MRT trains. Perhaps we might see improvements in customer service; after all, which retailer will want to appear in STOMP, but not in the advertisement section?
But I’m just wondering: is that all there is to citizen journalism?
It seems that citizen journalists in Singapore (in STOMP at least) have been reduced to the role of citizen policemen, out to catch all sorts of misbehaviour.
In actual fact, good citizen journalism should raise issues that are worthy of concern and yet are missed by the mainstream media. Citizen journalism should be thought-provoking, it should be intelligent and should not always rely on sensationalism and controversy. At its best, citizen journalism complements the traditional media in bringing news to its consumers, bringing about political and social debate. It is a catalyst for positive change.
Perhaps STOMP is a reflection of how many perceive Singaporean youths today – socially and politically apathetic. Perhaps in deciding what to include in the website, the editors figured that the Singaporean youth's daily reading diet consists of 8 days, Teenage, and Xiaxue. Or perhaps this is a perception that the STOMP editors bank upon, the idea that we couldn’t care less.
Instead of running STOMP to the ground as a pro-government mouthpiece and hence worthy of boycotting, I would like to propose that STOMP undergoes a makeover. The irony, however, is that much of STOMP's contents are generated by the youths they are reaching out to.
STOMP is The Straits Times’ foray into new media, which was started in June 2006. I was actually turned off by the website, which looked like a smorgasbord of advertisement posters. Designed for the youth crowd, it tried hard to hold the short attention spans of the wired generation with bright and cheery packaging, but turned out to be a splash of disorientated colours.
However, going beyond appearances, is STOMP all fluff and no stuff?
Some of its features include: a Star Blog section, where some of Singapore’s most popular bloggers convene to blog about certain predetermined topics, Ask ST, a hotline that promises to answer any questions a reader has under the sun, and Singapore Seen, where citizen journalists report on news and issues happening around Singapore.
As I delved into Singapore Seen, I wasn’t impressed by its contents. The news items in Singapore Seen mostly features complaints against public misbehaviour and poor customer service or trivial news that serve no purpose but to satiate a websurfer’s curiosity.
But I’m not saying it is all bad. Thanks to STOMP, people are now giving up their seats on the MRT trains. Perhaps we might see improvements in customer service; after all, which retailer will want to appear in STOMP, but not in the advertisement section?
But I’m just wondering: is that all there is to citizen journalism?
It seems that citizen journalists in Singapore (in STOMP at least) have been reduced to the role of citizen policemen, out to catch all sorts of misbehaviour.
In actual fact, good citizen journalism should raise issues that are worthy of concern and yet are missed by the mainstream media. Citizen journalism should be thought-provoking, it should be intelligent and should not always rely on sensationalism and controversy. At its best, citizen journalism complements the traditional media in bringing news to its consumers, bringing about political and social debate. It is a catalyst for positive change.
Perhaps STOMP is a reflection of how many perceive Singaporean youths today – socially and politically apathetic. Perhaps in deciding what to include in the website, the editors figured that the Singaporean youth's daily reading diet consists of 8 days, Teenage, and Xiaxue. Or perhaps this is a perception that the STOMP editors bank upon, the idea that we couldn’t care less.
Instead of running STOMP to the ground as a pro-government mouthpiece and hence worthy of boycotting, I would like to propose that STOMP undergoes a makeover. The irony, however, is that much of STOMP's contents are generated by the youths they are reaching out to.
