No
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008So much for my hopes of sneaking out for a day’s fishing during my visit to Singapore. Cyril Pereira and Ashok Nath from the Society of Publishers in Asia, arranged a schedule that didn’t even allow time for a stroll down Orchard Road. Breakfast power talks, working lunches, even the evenings meant more meetings with big hitters, not drinking lots of Tiger and troughing on Singapore’s excellent cuisine, as I’d hoped.
Still, he said grudgingly, the results were pretty good. One of my best meetings there was with Werner von Busch, a former editor-in-chief of Die Welt, who’s now heading the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Singapore.
We got on like Ashley Cole and an unnamed blonde (well, maybe not quite that well), bemoaning the quality of grammar these days, the downgrading of subs, the rise and rise of kids who can read a balance sheet being considered more important than experienced reporters: all the stuff you’d expect from two old hacks.
Don’t think that because much of Asia is “third world”, it’s still in the publishing dark ages. Things are flying here, especially in India. Design on many titles is equal to some of the best British and US titles.
Where it all goes wrong is in the editing. There’s still a tendency to drop in, fairly untouched, copy that needs a good sub to hack into it and ask tough questions, like: “What the hell does that mean?”
Most training, though, has been either “on the job” (we change your copy and don’t tell you why) or US-style lectures, which are as much use as a snow plough in Singapore.
An interview with the tabloid daily Today sums it all up. Praising the Straits Times for its “Pulitzer-prizewinning journalism”, the interview especially praises the broadsheet daily’s ability to rewrite government press releases “as if it was their own story”.
There’s work to be done here.