Dissident blogger Gopalan Nair had posted an entry stating that the Minister Mentor had suffered a serious heart attack on 6 March 2010. The blogpost also mentioned that there were pockets of civil unrest in Singapore following this development and that investors were scrambling to pull out of the country. Yesterday, Nair posted an entry saying that his previous post was a hoax and that "it was a deliberate attempt to highlight how tenuous Singapore is".

Socio-political website The Online Citizen (TOC), which had expressed its skepticism about Nair's post on its Facebook page on Sunday night, launched a scathing condemnation of the California-based lawyer within hours of his revelation that his earlier post was a hoax. TOC's editor-at-large Remy Choo Zheng Xi asserted that such deliberate misinformation ran contrary to the culture of community moderation that websites such as TOC practised.

In a facebook entry, TOC's Andrew Loh bemoaned that Nair had "shot us all who are in the alternative media in the foot". Loh further pointed out that Nair had a duty to act "more responsibly and with a little more thought" when airing views about Singapore. Elsewhere, prominent political blogger at Sgpolitics.net Ng E-Jay called for the Singapore blogosphere to "boycott and castigate" Nair's writings. Ng, who recently returned to the TOC core team as its political editor, also expressed his optimism that an informal self-regulating mechanism was taking shape in Singapore's blogosphere, judging by how netizens had reacted to the hoax.

Bloggers were not the only ones expressing their anger at Nair's bizarre behaviour. Popular forums such as HWZ and Sgforums were rife with regular netizens' critical commentaries against him. The Straits Times reported the controversy today (9 March). It noted that the stock market had not been taken in by the rumour and was unaffected.

In a sign that Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew remains in the pink of health, the Prime Minister's Office announced that he would be visiting the United Kingdom from 9 to 12 March to meet business and political leaders there.

Nair however, has not elicited any form of remorse despite the widespread condemnation of his actions by the Singapore blogosphere. In a postscript to his latest post, he expressed hope that the "stress and tension" of the episode would lead to a deterioration of the Minister Mentor's health.

• Click here for Journalism.sg's coverage of Gopalan Nair's run-in with the authorities in the past.

Assuming that the downward trend in American news industry is ahead of Asia by a few years, what timely lessons could Asian media draw from the missteps of the Americans, Daniel asked.

Jarvis’ reply drew from the decline of TV Guide, once one of America’s biggest weeklies – but he could just as easily have been referring to The Straits Times and other newspapers in Asia that are still highly profitable.

American editors could see the trends, he noted, but avoided the inevitable changes because their publications were still flowing with profits. This was the problem with being a cash cow, he said: “Don’t let it blind you to the necessity of changing utterly.”

American publishers had been guilty of a kind of protectionism, he added, protecting the old business models instead of throwing them open.

The two-day conference on The Future of News Media & Journalism (25-26 February 2010) was organised by the Asia Journalism Fellowship and the industry association WAN-IFRA. Over the last year or so, the newspaper business in the US has been stunned by high-profile losses and closures, prompting extensive soul searching about where the industry and profession are headed.

In Asia, news giants continue to be make money, with Singapore Press Holdings posting operating profits of around S$400 million last year despite the recession. However, newspaper circulations here have been stagnant or in slow decline. This has prompted SPH to move aggressively into online and mobile media such as omy.sg. But SPH’s different platforms still work largely in separate silos.

Part of the conference was devoted to exploring ways to integrate different media more effectively. However, a more fundamental challenge for journalists is to redefine their role, participants heard.

“It’s not printing on paper or distributing things,” said Jarvis of where journalism’s value lay. “It’s not even information, as information is a commodity. I think it’s in relationships. … Think as a service organisation, not just the manufacturer of a product.”

Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, agreed. “We are ultimately in the community business,” he said.

This shift will require professional journalists to become more open to collaboration with their communities, speakers said. American news organisations still thought of themselves as publishers when they should have been acting as network builders, Niles said.

Editors at the conference spoke of the opportunity to reconnect with the public. Reginald Chua, the new editor of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, said, “We tend to ask, what do we do, instead of asking what do people want? We really need to ask the question: what do people want.”

Bambang Harimurti, president of Indonesia’s Tempo group, said that newspapers, which once created a whole new market, were now followers. They had allowed their dependence on advertising revenue to affect their editorial independence.

“I’m not against advertisements, I just want advertisements on my terms,” he said. He hoped that as micropayment systems developed, news media could depend on readers instead.

“I would rather depend on millions of people who are willing to pay small amounts, like a few cents, because they believe in what you are doing. That to me is journalism at its best.”

While the conference heard various ideas about how news media could remain relevant and valued, nobody claimed that it would be possible to return to the years of 30-40 percent profitability. Over the long term, publishers and shareholders would have to get used to much lower margins, even in those news organisations that successfully restructured themselves.

• See also: "The future of journalism in a post-newspaper world"

Siew was particularly upbeat about the role new media entities were playing in cause-based advocacy and in raising the profile of the civil society here.  According to him, one of the reasons for the growth of new media in Singapore was its ability to organise people behind various causes. Dedicated websites and Facebook pages increasingly allow like-minded individuals to find each other easily. The ‘Day Off’ campaign, which calls for a regular day off for domestic workers, and the ‘Say No to Rape’ campaign were a few causes he cited that latched onto the Internet to increase their reach. However, he also expressed concerns over what he called the ‘echo chamber’ effect, as Internet users are at risk of embedding themselves in virtual enclaves where everyone had similar views.

Siew, who tabled the petition in parliament to repeal section 377A in 2007, shared with the audience the expressions of public support he garnered through the new media during the period. Although parliament eventually retained section 377A, the debate underlined the influence of the Internet, which was the main platform on which members of the public expressed their views on the matter.

Siew also identified the fact that the dynamics of political engagement in Singapore was changing, partly due to the effects of new media. The Internet he said, allowed robust debate to be brought straight into the domain of establishment figures, without the filtering that may occur in the mainstream media. Foreign Minister George Yeo’s Facebook page is one such example, as opposition figures such as Chee Soon Juan and Goh Meng Seng have engaged the minister through the social networking site. From the controversial Sammyboy 3-in-1 forum to the government’s feedback portal Reach, there has been a considerable increase in political discourse between Singaporeans as compared to two decades ago. Nonetheless, Siew added a caveat on this matter, stating that 'online participation does not necessarily translate into actual votes'.

When asked whether the new media would pose a threat to the legacy media, Siew opined that socio-political websites such as The Online Citizen and Temasek Review had the potential to directly challenge their mainstream counterparts. He said this could be done if the websites invested in producing more original content, instead of remaining purely reactionary.

In an ongoing Nanyang Business School-Business Times roundtable discussion series, information technology professors at Nanyang Technological University's Nanyang Business School (NBS) examine the rapid spread of social media and its implication for businesses, and try to find out if it is the next big thing.

Click here to read the full article.

It's not just historians who will benefit. Journalists writing about the present will now find it much simpler to provide readers with historical context. Pressed for time, most reporters tend to confine their background research to stories that can be accessed on their computers. Databases such as Factiva and Lexis-Nexis go back only a few decades.

Now, through NewspaperSG, users now have access to more than 548,000 pages of searchable text of the Digitised Straits Times (1845-1982) and microfilms of around 200 Singapore and Malaya newspapers stored at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library.

"Users who access the collection through the multimedia stations at our islandwide network of libraries will be able to search, view and print from The Straits Times digitised collection. Offsite users will also be able to access the website and view the articles but limited to the first 50 words of each full-text article," the library says.

Tan had written a research paper assessing the local mainstream media's coverage of the AWARE saga last year. He was invited by the organisers to speak on the topic "Debate and its nature in a non-public sphere".

In his presentation, Tan commented that the AWARE saga pointed out the fact that there was an unformed public sphere in Singapore – "a space where people can come together to talk about issues which are relevant to them in order to have an influence on government policy". With mainstream media having to operate under constraints, he said it is yet to be seen if the new media can take up the mantle of being the public sphere, given that they too have to grapple with larger societal issues.

In reply to a comment by an audience member who claimed that the local mainstream media lacked credibility in light of government regulation, Tan stated that there was empirical evidence to show that Singaporeans continue to regard the mainstream media as their most credible source of news. "There is no correlation between press freedom and press credibility in the world at all", he said.

Click here to read more about 2009 Year In Review, an event jointly organised by The Online Citizen and Talk Politics.

View Tan Tarn How's complete presentation and response to questions from the audience in the videos below.

Singapore has not been spared from the extensive coverage of the world’s number one golfer’s off-field exploits. Leading English language newspapers The Straits Times and Today have featured Woods on their front and prime pages several times since the story first broke.

Apart from introducing the world to Wood’s bevy of mistresses, the scandal has also highlighted the growing primacy of celebrity gossip sites like TMZ.com (TMZ) and Perezhilton.com in celebrity news reporting. Lacking the extensive grapevine of these websites in Hollywood, legacy media entities have been forced to take a back seat in reporting the latest celebrity scandals. Instead, they are increasingly relying on these tabloid websites and magazines for their latest leads on scandals, and in some cases cite them as sources.

The two biggest celebrity scandals of the year, the death of Michael Jackson and the current one encircling Tiger Woods, both had TMZ as the first source breaking the news. In both cases, unnamed informants tipped off TMZ and confirmed the occurrences before legacy media journalists caught a whiff of them.

Legacy media entities’ growing reliance on the tabloids and the likes of TMZ have major repercussions on existing journalistic standards and norms. While TMZ is owned by the same parent company as CNN (Time Warner), it certainly does not adhere to the professional reporting methods and editorial processes of its sister news organisation. For one, TMZ and several tabloids pay tip fees – payments made to sources in exchange for exclusive information they are privy to. The website has informants throughout West Hollywood, from hospital workers to neighbours of celebrities. There is no way to ascertain if all of TMZ’s anonymous sources have noble motives like Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal, but the monetary rewards offered to them cast doubt on their credibility. Harvey Levin, managing editor of TMZ, argues that this practice of chequebook journalism is perfectly fine, juxtaposing it to American television networks paying guests large sums of money for exclusive interviews. (See his interview with CNN here)

Elite news organisations have long frowned on such practices. The BBC’s editorial guidelines for example, explicitly state, “payment of a fee will only be approved for a contribution of remarkable importance with a clear public interest”.  The leaked police photograph of pop star Rihanna’s battered face after an altercation with her boyfriend hardly had any “public interest” value, but it cost TMZ $62,500 to publish it. The legality of the website's informal network is also questionable. Apart from Rihanna's photograph, which was meant to be used as evidence in court, the website has also published photos of death certificates, traffic summons and sheriff charge reports, in parts or otherwise. The website's brazen disregard for privacy and the confidentiality of certain documents is particularly worrisome, along with the apparent fact that it has sources within the various public service departments.

Tabloids and celebrity news websites also put pressure on the legacy media to match their immediacy in reporting events. A substantial number of articles found in websites like TMZ.com and Perezhilton.com have a single, anonymous source cited. Content is put out much faster than in newspapers or television networks, where journalists are required to seek out alternative sources to verify information they gather.

Despite making breakthroughs in being the first to report celebrity scandals, these celebrity gossip websites also have a tendency to misinform the public as the story develops, as a result of their reporting practices. In wanting to compete with the speed at which these websites publish breaking news developments, elite media entities risk compromising on the quality and accuracy of their content.

It is highly unlikely that we will see TMZ's journalistic practices mainstreamed into Singapore’s newspapers and television channels any time soon. For one, Americans’ voracious appetite for the intimate details of celebrities is unmatched here. In reporting celebrity scandals, the local mainstream media have been careful to quote more reliable sources like the wire agencies or other elite news sources even as they quote the new players like TMZ. Chequebook journalism and anonymous sources which are mainstays of the tabloids, have little space in our local media landscape where competition is less cutthroat.

However, the Tiger Woods coverage shows that for major international celebrity scandals, Singapore's press is not immune to the trend of allowing pseudo-journalistic sources to set the pace of coverage. Anxious not to left behind just in case the latest juicy detail in TMZ and the tabloids happens to be true, legacy media around the world have been picking up these unverified stories enthusiastically. When this happens, ST and Today have not been able to resist, either.

In the global context, the tabloids and websites like TMZ are here to stay, along with their unconventional journalistic methods. Harvey Levin summed up the influence of the website he has managed since its inception in December 2005. “We’ve become like the Associated Press in the world we cover”, he told the New York Times in an interview. It is a sign of the rise of these media entities that when Levin visited the world acclaimed Columbia J-school earlier this year, students flocked to give him their resume. Welcome to the future of journalism.

TR remains as ambitious as ever. "In ten years' time, the internet will emerge as the primary source of news for many Singaporeans and we want to be a key player when that happens," its caretaker manager said in an e-mail interview (full text below). He said the target was to register as a company, earn revenue through advertising and employ full-time journalists – something no socio-political website in Singapore has managed to do. Refusing to divulge more details, he said that the website was still “exploring the best option to take”, citing Malaysiakini and Huffington Post as possible models that his website might want to emulate.

The representative agreed to the interview on condition of anonymity, saying that this was in line with TR’s policy to “keep a loose structure for the time being” as the website was still finalising its organisational setup. Such coyness is one reason why many netizens are suspicious. Although many sites allow anonymous comments, Singapore's most influential independent sites have founders who were open about their own identities from day one. These range from the Singapore's first online magazine, Sintercom (Tan Chong Kee) and the grandfather of blogs, Yawning Bread (Alex Au), to later arrivals such as The Online Citizen (Choo Zheng Xi), Mr Brown (Lee Kim Mun), and even hard-hitting activist sites such as Singapore Rebel (Martyn See).

In contrast, TR has a page dedicated to the profiles of its columnists, but its leadership remains incognito. Some of its people are from Wayangparty.com, which is now inactive. A significant number of the website’s articles are attributed to nameless "Correspondents". This shroud of secrecy has led to rampant speculation about TR's motives, with some suggesting that the website is not quite the “independent, balanced and unbiased” Internet newspaper it has positioned itself to be.

The caretaker manager who answered our queries was not too fazed by such rumours. He said that “content is more important than the writer”, citing how other news entities like The Economist and Malaysiakini regularly do not attribute articles to any specific writer. He added that many of the website’s writers were not comfortable to reveal their real identities, but the number of hits on their articles showed that readers were not too turned off by their anonymity. Discounting what he called the “traditional view that a site has to be run by credible people”, he said that what was more important for a website like Temasek Review was to build its influence through increased readership even if that meant quality was sometimes compromised.

TR has also been accused of wanton plagiarism. Recently, an anonymous blogger set up a blog highlighting several instances where content generated by elite news entities like AFP, Voice of America and China’s People Daily were passed of as original content on Temasek Review. The bylines at the beginning of these articles attributed them to TR’s own "Correspondent".

The manager of Temasek Review dismissed these allegations, stating that the articles quoted in the blog “all have the sources stated at the bottom which he (the blogger) had deliberately chosen to omit when cropping them”. According to him, such a copy and paste method of news aggregation employed by Temasek Review was justified, considering how mainstream newspapers like The Straits Times regularly republished international news content produced by the wire agencies. He further added that the website could not be faulted “as long as we quote the source of the news” and that “everything posted in the Internet is for sharing under a Common Licensing Scheme unless explicitly stated otherwise”.

TR states on its site that it is a subscriber to various news sources. However, it may be ignoring the fact that individual subscriptions to news media do not include the right to reproduce their content. Indeed, commercial news media explicit forbid such unlicensed use of their stories and visuals. In this age of news aggregation, most news organisations have allowed news aggregators like The Huffington Post and Google News to carry link headlines and excerpts, as long as the full article remains on the source's website. TR, however, reproduces others' articles on its own site. Its sources don't seem to have taken offence so far, probably because TR is still too small a player to worry about. If TR becomes as big a player as it wants to be, however, its copy-and-paste journalism will probably attract a few lawyers' letters for copyright infringement.

Though profits are not the ultimate objective of Temasek Review, the plan is for it to be self-sustaining in the long term. It was revealed to us that the website is currently “fully self-funded”, with the caretaker manager one of the contributors. “It does not cost much to maintain the website at this stage”, he said. Part of the website’s financial strategy is also to have advertisement revenue from its sister website East Asia Review subsidise operating costs.

The ambitious plans of the website seem to have no place for other players in the local new media scene. When asked about the relationship between Temasek Review and other independent new media entities, its caretaker manager’s answer was curt: “We are not really keen to collaborate with others. We prefer to mind our own business”.

It remains to be seen how the website can deliver on its plans to become a professionally-run commercial outfit, with only a select few of such websites able to generate enough advertising and subscription revenue to hire journalists and other backroom staff. Temasek Review is still some way off from becoming the fully-fledged online newspaper a la Malaysiakini that its caretaker manager envisions it to be.

One thing that's certain is that if it wants to register itself as a firm in Singapore, it will have to change its name. As the old name for Singapore, "Temasek" can't be used by just anybody. If TR tries to register it at bizfile.gov.sg, it will get the automated reply, "Your name is considered undesirable for use in a business entity."

THE FULL INTERVIEW

On who's behind Temasek Review

Your ‘About Us’ page offers readers quite a comprehensive view of TR’s vision as well as a general scope of the type of news you cover. However it does not delve into the origins of the website. What spurred the proprietors and contributors of Wayang Party to set up TR? What was it that you felt a news website could do that a simple blog could not?

TR is an evolving project and we are still quite far away from our eventual goal of becoming a full-fledged internet newspaper like Malaysiakini. We see a lot of potential in the growth of this industry in the future which TR is already in a pole position to take advantage of it. The print media is a sunset industry. In ten years' time, the internet will emerge as the primary source of news for many Singaporeans and we want to be a key player when that happens.

Quite a significant amount of content on TR is attributed to ‘Our Correspondent’. Could you tell us the rationale behind this anonymity? Wouldn’t it be more credible for your writers use their own names?

The content is more important than the writer. In fact, many established news magazines and websites do not attribute their articles to any particular writer, e.g. the Economist, Malaysiakini, The Malaysian Insider, Asia Sentinel and even the Straits Times. This has been our practice all along and it had not stopped readers from visiting our site. Of course if we have paid journalists on the team one day, they are expected to pen their names down for every article they write. While there will be some readers who are put off by anonymous writers, most will not care a hoot about it.

TR has no Chief Editor currently. Why is this so? Who then is overall in charge in TR and who is ultimately responsible for the editorial integrity of the website?

We used to have one managing editor, but she is not doing a good job. Right now, we are still searching for one, preferably a trained journalist who share our vision. It is more important to find the right person rather than just to get somebody to fill the role.

What roles do Mr Abdul Gafoor and Ms Tashia Dixon play in TR?

Abdul Gafoor runs his own academic column autonomously on TR as he is a researcher himself. Tashia Dixon is currently taking charge of a project we have spun off. She is not involving in the editorial work.

TR has a page with the profiles of your writers. Judging from their profiles, your writers seem to come from quite a diverse backgrounds. What is your recruitment process like, how do you assess that the writers have what it takes to write for TR?

They just simply drop us an email and offer to write for us. We want to have as large a pool of writers as possible from different backgrounds in order to add diversity to the content of the site.

Could you briefly outline your policy on moderation of comments on TR?

We have four administrators as of now and each has their own guidelines. In general, all comments touching on race and religion will be censored as well as vulgarities, offensive and potentially defamatory comments.

Anonymous commentators on the blogosphere have been speculating about the financing of your website. Perhaps you might want to put the rumours to rest. Who are the proprietors of the website and could you outline all of  TR’s sources of revenue?

We are entirely self-funded and I am one of the contributors. It does not cost much to maintain TR at this stage, but we will need to secure more investments if we are to go further.

With regards to revenue, I caught a comment by an ‘admin’ that your sister website the East Asia Review is essential in getting advertising revenue for your future company to stay afloat. What is the current status of East Asia Review? How successful has TR and East Asia Review been in attracting advertising revenue?

As you should know, the revenue from google advertising is pathetic.

On plagiarism

There have been accusations of plagiarism. There's even a website set up to highlight this alleged plagiarism. There seems to be a lack of distinction between news aggregation and actual generation of original content: the ‘By our correspondent’ at the start of these articles has the effect of misleading readers. Your comments?

All our world articles are aggregated from other sites which we will always publish the source at the bottom like the Straits Times. As for the blogger who took the trouble to set up a blog to accuse us of plagiarism, we must really thank him for the publicity. The "plagiarized" articles he quoted all have the sources stated at the bottom which he had deliberately chose to omit when cropping them. Our regular readers will know that there is absolutely no basis in his allegations at all. For netizens who are not aware of our site, it will only make them more curious to know about us. Readers can judge for themselves whether the articles we produced on TR are plagiarized from elsewhere. They will not be so stupid to believe whatever the site says. We can't survive for so long on plagiarism alone, can we?

You seem to be saying that it is OK to copy and paste as long as you credit the source at the bottom. You also use pictures that you don't have rights to. Is copyright a non-issue to you?

Of course copyright is an issue to us. Everything posted on the internet is for sharing under a Common Licensing Scheme unless it is explicitly stated otherwise like Asia Times and Financial Times. As long we quote the source of the news, I don't think anybody can find fault with us. If you look at the Straits Times, most of its world news are republished from AFP and Reuters and they don't even bother to print the source at the beginning of the article unlike us. South China Morning Post republishes articles on China from Reuters as well. If you check out our featured gallery, you will realize we publish the source of every photos we took from elsewhere.

On relations with other blogs

What kind of relationship do you have with other bloggers or news websites like TOC? What kind of relationship do you think exists between independent new media practitioners in Singapore? Is It collaborative or adversarial and why?

We are not really keen to collaborate with others. We prefer to mind our own business.

What do you think sets you apart from TOC? Is there a conscious effort on your part to build a comparative advantage over TOC, especially since the your audience is similar to theirs? What is TR’s unique selling point?

We have never compared ourselves to other sites or set out specifically to build an advantage over them. We are pretty clear about the end-point and everything we do must bring us closer to the eventual goal. The rest doesn't matter.

On the tiff with SPH

Your recent spat with Geoffrey Pereira of SPH regarding the alleged DDOS attacks on TR is an issue of contention in the local new media. Judging from the comments of readers with knowledge about the technicalities, such an allegation by TR was misplaced because it cannot be definitively confirmed. How has TR resolved the issue and do you still stand by your initial allegations?

We had never accused SPH of attacking our site from the very beginning. It was Geoffrey who chose to obfuscate the matter and turned it into an attack on our credibility. In the end, he still hasn't answered the key question if SPH has "grabbed" content from our site. We have since banned all SPH IP addresses from accessing TR which will resolve the problem once and for all. As far as we are concerned, the matter is now closed and we don't see any need to dredge it up again.

On turning professional

What are TR’s plans for the future – short term (2010) and long term?

There will be major changes along the way including a complete revamp of the existing site and the addition of other sister sites. The next step is of course to register a company after which it will make it easier for us to employ journalists. Right now, we are just republishing news from elsewhere. We want to start producing original news of our own. Only then will we be able to take the next leap forward.

Very few websites, whether news organisations or independent sites, have been able to generate enough advertising or subscription revenue to hire journalists. What's your strategy to succeed where thousands around the world have failed?

I can name you three successful websites run by full-time journalists off-hand – Huffington Post, Malaysiakini and Merdeka Review. There are two others which may not be considered as very successful but have managed to keep themselves afloat for quite sometime – Irrawaddy and Asia Sentinel. Right now, we are still exploring the best option to take. We do not really need a large team of journalists like Malaysiakini. Just one or two will be fine. Though profit-making is not our ultimate motive, we do hope to keep the sites self-sustaining in the long run. That's why we have to get the right people in. If you are in it for the money only, then you are going to get disappointed because there isn't a lot of money to be made in the first place.

Although many professional media carry unsigned articles, no professional media hide the identities of their editors and management teams. Some of your leaders, however, prefer to remain in the shadows. In this respect, you behave more like amateur blogs than like professional websites. The way you lift others' content also makes you more similar to amateur blogs than to professional sites. Yet, you claim that your end-goal is to be a commercially viable internet news site. How do you plan to earn the trust of advertisers and investors if you remain in the shadows?

Temasek Review is still an amateur blog and we are not afraid to admit that. Because we are amateurs, the standard expected of us is lower than professional sites and we are given plenty of leeway to explore and make mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable in the process without which we cannot identity our weaknesses and rectify them. In a way, TR is an ongoing experiment, it will continue to evolve and develop with time. It is not fair to accuse of us of "lifting" contents from elsewhere. The Straits Times does it everyday. Even some of its opinion pieces are replicated from Project Syndicate, New York Times and other sites while we write our own articles, so do you consider us to be more "professional" than Straits Times in this aspect?

Our past experience have shown us that the content of a news site is what that matters most, not the identity of its editors or owners. You can have a team of known PhD journalists blogging on a site, but it won't make it a success. Take for example the P65 site, it was run by the PAP MPs and has the support of the government and mainstream media, but why didn't it take off?

We have many freelance columnists who are not comfortable to reveal their identities, but they write very good articles and we often publish them anonymously. Yet these are the articles which attract more hits than those written by known writers on our site.

The traditional view that a site has to be run by credible known people is grossly outdated. In the online media, readership is what counts – the more readers a site has, the more influential it will become. Quality journalism deserves an audience. Beggars can't be choosy. TR has to work within its constraints to build up its readership first sometimes at the expense of quality, but without readership, then we can't even sustain the site in the long run.

In order to attract advertisers, we need to have a business model in place first to liaise with them which is what we are trying to do now. Of course they will know who they are dealing with. They can't be talking to "shadows", can they?

Finally, any parting comments to your readers with regards to the recent controversies surrounding the website?

They have already dissipated. We can't control what other people say about us, we can only concentrate on our work which is to provide an alternative source of news in Singapore. These controversies / speculations will not hurt us a bit. On the contrary, they have helped to boost our readership instead. That's how the internet works. It is impossible to discredit or demolish anybody or website without giving it free publicity. Tongues may wag for a while, but it will all be forgotten soon. We are quite flattered by the attention given to TR. Nobody will take notice of you if you are just an unknown.

Opposition leaders have already criticised the plan as another move to tilt the playing field against them. Few would disagree with their assessment if licensed mainstream media are the only news sources permitted to influence voters during the "cooling-off" period.

PM Lee Hsien Loong revealed that a Bill is in the works to "extend the period between Nomination Day and Polling Day by one extra day and use that extra day as a cooling off period before polling itself". At present, campaigning is banned on Polling Day but allowed right up to the previous night.

The cooling-off day would give voters more time to reflect on the issues without being bombarded by new messages from the candidates, the PM said. The exception would be the party political broadcast, which could air on the eve of Polling Day. These broadcasts comprise free airtime on Singapore TV channels given to the main parties. They are allocated time in proportion to the number of seats they contest.

Just as news media are now permitted to publish news and opinion on Polling Day, they would also be allowed to do so during the cooling-off day. As for online content from candidates and their parties – "what you are putting out in your own name", as Lee put it – these fall squarely in the "campaigning" category and would be banned during Polling Day and its Eve.

Between these two categories is a grey area: online content that is produced by an individual or group that's neither the internet operation of a licensed news organisation (such as straitstimes.com or channelnewsasia.com, which would get the green light) nor the official website of a candidate or party (such as pap.sg, yoursdp.org or wp.sg, all of which would get the red light).

In this grey area would be a wide variety of "citizen journalism" sites. Some may be come across as  balanced, while others may be ideologically partisan but without any explicit connection to parties. How will they be treated under the proposed legislation?

Green light for citizen journalism?

If Singaporeans are allowed to consume mainstream media reports of the campaign on the cooling-off day and Polling Day, it is difficult to justify denying them the right to read alternative media reports produced by their fellow citizens. This is why citizen journalism should be granted the same "news" exemption as licensed media.

However, the drafters of the legislation will no doubt worry about the risk that a few of these citizen journalists are actually proxies of political parties. Allowing them to circulate could amount to a large loophole in the law.

Red light for citizen journalism?

The Government's customary way of closing such a loophole is to recognise only licensed news organisations as providers of "news". This is the approach taken in the new legislation on filming illegal protests: licensed news organisations may cover such events, but citizen journalists may not. (See earlier article on civil disobedience videos.)

However, it would be a mistake to define "campaigning" so broadly that the cooling-off law bans all news and commentary by non-licensed online news providers and commentators. This would not in fact prevent determined party activists from finding ways to evade the law: they would still get their messages across. The only ones who would be deterred are the more law-abiding and moderate citizen journalists. Thus, cyberspace would be hollowed out of precisely the voices you would want to hear, denying Singaporeans potentially valuable insights that will help them make rational decisions on Polling Day.

This prospect already has independent bloggers fuming. Gerald Giam says sarcastically, "How nice to know I will have one extra day to clear my mind of the nonsense that opposition candidates were sprouting the previous nine days, and for one full day reflect on the rational and objective rebuttals by the government (but not the PAP, wink, wink) disguised as news the day before Polling Day."

Green light, please

Although surveys show that the mainstream media are overwhelmingly more relied on than the internet as a source of election information, online media play a vital role in providing alternative perspectives.

Reports on the cooling-off proposal have noted that several other countries, such as Australia and Indonesia, have similar systems. One important difference is that in these countries, unlike Singapore, governments are not allowed to impose discretionary licensing on news media. Therefore, voters can still receive a wide range of perspectives through their traditional media during the cooling-off period. As long as Singapore's newspaper, tv and radio choices are constrained by licensing, Singapore voters will need alternative online media for a fuller picture.

But if citizen journalism is banned, the biggest loser would be the Government itself. The move would hand a fresh round of ammunition to those who say that the PAP can only win by denying Singaporeans a plurality of media. Better to live with the loophole, which is practically impossible to close, than to engage in overkill.

• Read the ST article on PM Lee's remarks here.

As for the criticism that the national newspaper over-covered the issue, Tan suggests the opposite. He argues that at least three key issues of great public importance were not given sufficient airing: how different interest groups should engage with one another; democratic decision making in organisations; and the role of religion in public life. "In terms of journalistic professionalism, too much coverage is a problem, but too little is a far greater one," he writes.

Tan declares his interest as a former journalist with the Straits Times.

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