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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

TEN QUID FOR A NEWSPAPER?

I'm passionate about publishing and the media, and last weekend in Singapore that passion extended to spending S$19 (about 455 baht or getting on for ten quid in UK money) for one edition of a daily newspaper.
Some of you might think I'm crazy, but getting a copy of the weekend edition of The Sydney Morning Herald gives a wonderful glimpse into newspaper publishing down under. And to have it on the same day it was printed adds to the excitement - and the cost!
Facsimile copies of many global daily newspapers are available through a company called Newspaper Direct in Thailand, but often those copies are missing headlines or printed far too dark. And they never contain everything that was in the original newspaper. What's a weekend newspaper without its magazine, the endless sections and, of course, the inserts? 
This particular Australian edition is so jam-packed with content, as is the Saturday edition of Singapore's Straits Times. The Bangkok Post and The Nation, Thailand's two English language dailies, combined would not even come close to half the pagination of these overseas titles.
There's a market for these kinds of 'real' daily newspaper in Singapore although I've yet to find anywhere in Bangkok that sells anything other than the usual mix of The Wall Street Journal Asia, International Herald Tribune and The Financial Times. I'd certainly be keen to know anywhere that sells same-day copies of Straits Times, especially the Saturday edition, in Bangkok.

4 comments:

Matthew Hunt 8:39 PM  

A good weekend newspaper is worth the money!

Same-day copies are hard to find in Bangkok; even the international edition of The Guardian is a day late.

I'm trying not to buy Newspaper Direct copies too often, because they're such a rip-off.

Chris Iveson 12:14 PM  

Applications such as PressReader for the iPad are great for reading the latest print-version of newspapers from all around the globe. It seems they generally charge $1 to download, but have noticed it is on a pay-per-section basis.

'Pong 3:47 PM  

Since it's weekend edition, it is like double the size for Sunday as well. Mind you, we stopped buying papers for years but it was nice to read the paper in a cafe on a nice Sunday afternoon.

(c) 2016 Written by Andrew Batt 5:24 AM  

Thanks for your comments.

There's just something about print that does it for me. I would not spend $1 for a digital edition but I'd happily spend $15 on the "real" thing.

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