QotW9: STOMP

Straits Times Online Mobile Print (STOMP) is an extension of Singapore’s main English-language newspaper, The Straits Times. It is a website setup by Singapore Press Holdings to attempt to deliver current affairs to the youth.

What makes Stomp different from The Straits Times is that the news that is featured on STOMP is not the work of professional journalist. Instead, STOMP promotes citizen journalism. Citizen journalism is the act of citizens ‘playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information (‘Citizen journalism’, 2007). Any layman, with a digital camera and a good enough command of grammar, can now be a journalist contributing to the good of many others. Moreover with the integration of cameras in everyday ‘essentials’ like the mobile phone, quite literally everyone can be a journalist. What this means is that wherever and whenever a newsworthy incident occurs, a ‘journalist’ is there. All the ‘journalist’ has to do to publish his or her article is to get on the Internet, log on to STOMP and information is ready to be shared.

On the other hand, there is a downside to this. Due to the liberal nature of the website and the entire idea of ‘citizen journalism’, a good amount of news that are published in STOMP can be deemed somewhat trivial. Ask yourself honestly; does an article of the indecent exposure of some random person’s butt cheeks take precedence over Sing Power’s $17 billion dollar buyout of an Australian firm?

Do not get me wrong. Personally, I do feel that citizen journalism is revolutionary and STOMP is a valiant attempt. But it could be a brilliant way to deliver citizen journalism that will interest the masses, not just for the youth.

We all know that the Singapore’s government, the People’s Action Party (PAP), has shares in Singapore Press Holdings. And we all have notions that the government practices the priming of information. But in the case for STOMP, I think that a kind of filter will actually do some good to achieve mass customization, disintermediation and media convergence ('We the Media', 2004).

STOMP is an online community of citizen journalist. One of the rules of how we should behave on the Internet is that we should respect each other people's time and bandwidth ('Netiquette', 1994). In saying that, some of the news articles that make it on STOMP may not be worthy. But who are we to say that which happenings are not important?
Ideally, the party who runs STOMP should be impartial, that is not prone to the influence of the government. Only then can we be assured that the news that is published is not messages that the government is feeding us.

To tackle the problem of what is deemed newsworthy, we should allow the public to decide. Categorizing the news published gives the reader options to what he or her wants to read.

It is amazing how information technology has evolved the passive reader to now have an active role. We can only hope that we can take advantage and thus, making us more informed.

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Reference:

Citizen Journalism
Retrieved on 30/3/2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism

We the Media, Dan Gilmor, 2004
Retrieved on 29/3/2007
http://download.nowis.com/index.cfm?phile=WeTheMedia.html&tipe=text/html

Netiquette, V.Shea, 1994
Retrieved on 29/3/2007
http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/internet/netiquet.htm