Week 8 – Case studies: STOMP
Singapore’s main media group, Singapore Press Holdings, launched a website called STOMP (Straits Times Online Mobile and Print) in June 2006. STOMP is a very popular website in Singapore.
So you can understand its popularity, Singapore’s population is approximately 4.4 million, and within half a year of STOMP operating, it had 300,000 visitors.
Between 80 to 85 per cent of the site’s content is made up of citizen journalism. Yet, I still wondered how a site that is created from citizen journalism content can be accurate, trustworthy, and engaging people to take an interest in what citizens have to say about the news, rather than taking the qualified and educated information from a ‘real’ journalist.
Well, this is how it works… People send an SMS to STOMP about an issue or a story they want published or see as newsworthy. These people are interviewed about their story, and then the STOMP producers re-write the story. Before it is published online the person reads it, and checks it for accuracy. If they are happy, then it’s published, if not, then they fix it.
According to Jennifer Lewis who is the editor of STOMP, citizen journalism works differently in other countries, like South Korea. Ohmynews, for example, which is what I wrote about in my previous posts talks about how citizen journalists follow a code of ethics and how they are responsible for what they write.
Although the STOMP site contains things like, ‘talkback’ and ‘club stomp’ which tend to attract teenagers and young adults, it also contains journalism that deals with people’s lives. Therefore according to Jasmine Teo, a STOMP content producer, middle-aged people are also known to interact with the site.
REFERENCES
Quinn, S. (2007). “Citizen journalism gets things done in Singapore as digital revolution moves forward” in Innovations in Newspapers 2007.
Entries (RSS)