Yesterday,

The Straits Times

published an

op-ed

by associate opinion editor Lydia Lim on how the newspaper has been trying to innovate.

In turn, companies who are facing inertia in their bid to transform themselves could take a leaf out of SPH’s book.

However, Ms Lim’s column reads more like a PR piece to defend the company’s financial struggles than an actual dissection of innovation; her 1,300-word article is also locked behind the newspaper’s “premium” paywall. No surprise that for the longest time, most Singaporeans have considered SPH and innovation to be as compatible as Donald Trump and immigration.

SPH’s main challenge, Ms Lim writes, is how it can “better engage audiences”. Yet, as the company still attempts to recover from a 25% drop in profit in Q2, its only solution has been to widen the coverage of its paywall.

What started as a few in-depth articles branded with the ‘Premium’ tag has now expanded to include about 80% of Singapore-centric articles.

On its site, ST calls its subscriber-only articles as “some of its best content”: exclusive stories, interviews, features, as well as in-depth opinion pieces by the paper’s senior writers and network of contributors.

But just by looking at ST’s premium stories over the weekend, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Should the company be surprised at all that Singaporeans aren’t reading them any more when they are forced to pay for content as such?