Abstract
This article examines newspaper coverage of the arts in Singapore to consider the role of the island state’s newspapers in the development and documentation of Singapore’s growing arts scene. Sampling two constructed weeks for each of 10 years, 1999 to 2008, content analysis is used to examine arts coverage in the Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao. The study benefits from groundwork laid by Janssen’s 1999 study of arts coverage in Dutch newspapers, in which not only quantity of content was reported but also hierarchical attention was paid to art forms over decades. Singapore is of interest as it represents a country where neither the arts nor newspapers are declining, and both enjoy significant overseeing by the government.
Highlights
In the West, newspapers face challenges similar to those the arts have encountered in the past few years: declining income, declining audiences, and challenges from less sophisticated forms of art on one hand and news on the other
We look at how the arts are reported in the news pages of the two leading newspapers in Singapore, the Englishlanguage Straits Times and the Chinese-language Lianhe Zaobao, looking at both hard news and the softer lifestyle pages
The most written about art form was popular music (272, or 22.4%), followed by the performing arts (199, or 16.4%), film
Summary
In the West, newspapers face challenges similar to those the arts have encountered in the past few years: declining income, declining audiences, and challenges from less sophisticated forms of art on one hand and news on the other. In 1998, the National Arts Journalism Program (2004) at Columbia found that in many newsrooms, “arts journalism continues to be a lower priority than other fields such as business and sports.”. By contrast, those priorities were reversed in Singapore political history. The city-state of Singapore is an intriguing case study of the relationship between newsprint media and the arts, because each has developed under and continues to receive government oversight, and neither is in decline as is the case for both in some Western countries.
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