In its chase for reach and engagement, 89-year-old Tamil Murasu (TM), one of the oldest Tamil publications in the world, is sparing no effort to adapt to the evolving patterns of news consumption.
The Indian community is perhaps the most complex ethnic community in Singapore. While the majority are Tamils, about two-fifths of Indians are non-Tamils who use various other mother tongue languages. While Hinduism is the most common religion among Indians, many practice other faiths like Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. Perhaps it is because of this complexity, and the need to co-exist in a diverse environment, that there is a growing trend of Indian Tamils engaging with English or bilingual content, over those purely in Tamil.
According to the Singapore Census of Population 2020, within the Indian ethnic group, those who spoke English most frequently at home in 2020 was 59.2 percent, up from 41.6 percent in 2010. This is the largest percentage among the different ethnic groups.
Being a mainstream publication, capturing young eyeballs remains a challenge — as about three-quarters of TM users range between 35 and 64 years old.
Gone is the era of wordy articles and hours-long video segments. Today’s youths want their information to be quick, fast, and easily accessible. Failure to adapt to the digital environment puts us at risk of being left behind.
Multiple surveys and studies have shown that those below 25 years old prefer to consume information directly from social media rather than from news sources. They engage better with bite-sized content that is informal and authentic.
New app targeting youth
To reach out to the young audience, TM launched its app in October 2023. The app adopts social media behavioral features like TikTok’s vertical swipeable videos and Instagram post-styled story cards to resonate with the youth.
Lifestyle widgets such as the latest movie showtimes, events in Singapore, and horoscopes are available in the ‘Discover’ section of the app, providing content beyond news.
Creating the app was no mean feat, requiring strong collaboration from tech to product. It took nine months of preparation, ideation, and creation before it was ready to go to market. Focus group discussions with youths and rigorous research were done before its public launch.
While the TM app exceeded its download expectations, the app has to work harder to achieve its primary goal of engaging youth below 35 years old.
This led the newsroom to accelerate its presence on social media, in tandem with content production. Most of the growth in following on TM’s TikTok account with some 60K followers and Instagram page with about 30K followers, was achieved in the past year — highlighting our zeal to capture the young hearts.
Navigating a new world
Moving to a digital-first newsroom is also beyond just having the right products.
The TM editorial team had to restructure its manpower. Apart from writing articles, reporters also shoot, produce, and front videos, working effectively as multimedia journalists. On weekdays, TM produces 1-minute news videos that highlight the top news of the day, and the top five news videos that briefly summarise the must-know news of the day.
In mid-2023, TM also transitioned to a new content management system (CMS) that allows for workflows to be digital-first. Most stories are first published online before they are taken for print. The CMS ensures that all stories are retrofitted with relevant pictures, tags, sections, related articles, and other metadata before publication.
The quality of news articles matters just as much as the quantity, as most of the traffic for TM comes through search engines and social media, which promote articles to users based on their relevance and quality. The tech team regularly maintains and fixes bugs and issues on the website and app to ensure a high-performing site with fast loading speeds. These enhancements are critical to the user experience, as well as the promotion and reach of content.
More can be said about the extensive efforts of not just TM, but also SPH Media news titles, in trying to anticipate market needs and tailoring content to suit the current audience’s needs.
However, any successful publication also tries to crystal gaze into the future — anticipating the needs of tomorrow’s readers today. To that end, today’s newsrooms have to seriously look at artificial intelligence (AI) and how it can impact the newsrooms of tomorrow.
We are constantly identifying new AI and tech tools. TM implemented a tag recommender tool that recommends the most SEO-friendly news tags for any given article. Soon, our CMS will also integrate an AI summariser tool, that generates short English translations (within 100 words) of all our Tamil articles — in a bid to further the publication’s bilingual offerings and attract young audiences.
The marriage of people equipped with expertise in different areas focusing on the same end goal is what makes TM tick. The support of the SPH Media ecosystem that TM sits in, serves as the crucial backbone for its ambitions in Singapore and beyond.
Venga Subramaniam is the Audience and Growth Editor, Tamil Murasu.
Venga joined Tamil Murasu in 2018 and has won multiple awards during his time as a journalist. Most notably, his story titled ‘Three S’porean sisters married to Three Indian brothers’ was a runner-up story of the year at English/Malay/Tamil Media Annual Awards 2019, while his story – ‘Repatriating 51 illegally-smuggled Indian Star Tortoises’ won excellence in journalism at the 2018 Awards. In 2021, he transferred to the financial daily The Business Times, where he covered SME and macroeconomic beats for more than a year. He rejoined Tamil Murasu at the start of 2023 to become their Digital Editor and is now their Audience and Growth Editor who oversees the publication’s multimedia content and online strategy. As a communications undergraduate from NUS, Venga also holds an MBA from SMU.
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