The Straits Times

• 1. Introduction

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  The Straits Times has been printing since the 15th of July 1845, making it one of the oldest newspapers in Southeast Asia. It started life as an eight-page weekly published at 7 Commercial Square in Singapore, run on a hand-operated press, with subscriptions costing Sp.$1.75 a month. Today it is Singapore's newspaper of record, the most widely circulated paper in the country, with a significant regional readership stretching across the rest of Southeast Asia.

  But its journey to that position is far stranger and more turbulent than the stature suggests. The paper emerged from a bankrupt Armenian merchant's abandoned printing project. It survived fires, libel suits, Japanese occupation, and a name change imposed at gunpoint. It transformed from a fierce critic of colonial administrators into what some have called a government mouthpiece. And in 2023, a leak revealed that circulation figures had been inflated by tens of thousands of copies a day.

  How does a newspaper founded on the ideals of a free press end up embedded so deeply in the machinery of state? That question sits at the heart of The Straits Times' long and complicated life.

• 2. An Armenian's Abandoned Dream

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  Catchick Moses did not set out to found a newspaper. He bought a printing press because his friend Marterus Thaddeus Apcar had failed to use it. Apcar, an Armenian merchant, had wanted to start an English-language paper to compete with The Singapore Free Press, which William Napier had founded in 1835. Apcar hired an editor and ordered a press from England. The editor died before the equipment arrived. Apcar went bankrupt shortly after.

  Moses purchased the press from his fallen friend and partnered with Robert Carr Woods Sr., an English journalist who had come from Bombay, to launch The Straits Times and Singapore Journal of Commerce on the 15th of July 1845. Historian Mary Turnbull doubts the received story, arguing it was unlikely an Armenian merchant would have been motivated to establish an English-language newspaper given the existing competition. Whatever the precise origins, Moses soon found the venture unprofitable and in September 1846 handed the paper outright to Woods.

  Woods set about distinguishing his paper from the rival Singapore Free Press by publishing humour, short stories, and foreign news sourced via the steamship mail services that had launched around the same time as the paper. To offset the financial losses, he used the press for side projects, including the first directory of Singapore, The Straits Times Almanack, Calendar and Directory, published in 1846.

• 3. Brooke, Fire, and Survival

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  Robert Carr Woods Sr. picked his first political fight carefully, or perhaps recklessly, depending on how you read the outcome. He went after James Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak, charging that Brooke's campaign against Dayak so-called pirates was in fact a massacre of peaceful civilian merchants. The rival Singapore Free Press took Brooke's side. The resulting public controversy boosted the readership of both papers.

  Woods petitioned the British government for a formal inquest in 1851. A commission convened in 1854. Brooke was exonerated, but the prolonged public drama had done wonders for The Straits Times. The controversy transformed a struggling weekly into a viable daily, and the paper switched to daily publication in 1858. Woods sold the paper two years later in 1860.

  His successor as editor, John Cameron, faced a different kind of catastrophe. A fire tore through the paper's premises with such destructive force that its assets were sold at public auction for just $40. Cameron went bankrupt. Somehow he revived the paper anyway. Six years after Cameron's death in 1881, his widow appointed Arnot Reid, a young Scottish journalist, to the editor's chair. Reid held the position for 12 years, during which the paper continued building its reputation as a recorder of political and economic life across British Malaya.

• 4. The Thunderer of the East

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  Alexander W. Still took over as editor after Reid's retirement and held the post for 18 years. Under his leadership The Straits Times acquired a nickname: the "Thunderer of the East", a deliberate echo of The Times of London's famous moniker. Still believed the press existed to serve the community and had an obligation to expose corruption in both government and business.

  He put that belief in writing. "In the modern constitution of society, the press has great functions to perform," Still wrote in an editorial. "It is the chief safeguard against corruption... our business is to do what we deem right and necessary in the public interest, and no law court can be the keeper of our conscience." His outspokenness generated libel suits, which the paper either lost or settled out of court.

  Still was not consistent in his idealism. He called for better working conditions for Malay, Chinese, and Indian labourers, but on the explicit grounds that it would improve their efficiency and productivity for British employers. He considered the Asian population of Singapore "untrustworthy" and argued they should not hold positions of power or serve in the military. Asian reporters at the paper faced discrimination both in the newsroom and while on assignment. An Indian reporter named Peter Benson Maxwell arranged an interview with Governor Cecil Clementi through the governor's secretary, then was promptly removed from Government House when he arrived in person.

  Circulation grew from 3,600 in 1910 to 4,100 in 1920 under Still's editorship. He retired in 1926, and the paper cycled through four editors in two years before George Seabridge took over in 1928.

• 5. Competition and Transformation

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  George Seabridge ran the paper for 18 years and oversaw its expansion from 5,000 to 25,000 subscribers. The pressure that forced this growth came from the Malaya Tribune, founded in 1914, which promised frank coverage of Malayan affairs and hired writers from Singapore's Chinese, Indian, and Muslim communities. In 1932, the Tribune's circulation surpassed that of The Straits Times.

  Seabridge responded decisively. He built a new office, updated printing equipment, hired local journalists, and started delivery to areas outside the city. He launched a Sunday edition, incorporated photographs and comics, expanded coverage of Singaporean and Malayan affairs, and cut the price of the paper to match the Tribune. He also created a "women's columns" section aimed partly at British planters' wives. By 1933 the revived Singapore Free Press, which had been relaunched after folding in 1869, could no longer sustain the competition and Seabridge bought it.

  In 1938, Seabridge began air delivery of the paper to Kuala Lumpur, from which vans distributed copies to rural areas. Two of the journalists the Tribune had recruited to take on The Straits Times, Leslie Hoffman and T. S. Khoo, ultimately ended up at the paper they had competed against, becoming its editor-in-chief and deputy editor-in-chief after World War II.

• 6. Occupation and Propaganda

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  Japanese attacks in northern Malaya began on the 8th of December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. Seabridge had spent months urging Duff Cooper, whom Winston Churchill had appointed in July 1941 to coordinate defence policy in Asia, to take civil defence more seriously. Cooper arrived in Singapore in September 1941 and found that the various civil, military, and governmental bodies were not communicating with each other. Seabridge and F. D. Bisseker of the Eastern Smelting Company pressed Cooper to build up defences and institute martial law.

  As the situation deteriorated, The Straits Times published a lead article on the 5th of January 1941 that barely concealed its frustration. "That is a reasonably accurate summary of all the people of this country have been told of the fighting that is going around them," the paper wrote, cataloguing the vague reports of "strategic withdrawals" the public had been given. "If the newspapers and the newspaper reading public are to be any help in combatting rumour, they must be supplied with the only things which are of the slightest value in carrying out the task. And those things are facts."

  Singapore fell on the 15th of February 1942. Seabridge and his wife fled to Batavia, present-day Jakarta, four days before the fall. Five days after the city fell, on the 20th of February 1942, Japan renamed The Straits Times. It became The Shonan Times, Shonan being the Japanese name for Singapore. Its first issue carried a declaration by Tomoyuki Yamashita pledging to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  The paper changed names several more times as factions within the Japanese administration argued over romanisation systems. By the 8th of December 1943 it had become the Syonan Shimbun, the date chosen to mark the anniversary of the invasion. The paper was used as a propaganda vehicle. In June 1942 the Military Propaganda Squad launched Nippon-Go Popularising Week through its pages and drafted some 150 members of the Japanese literary world to Singapore, including the novelist Masuji Ibuse and poet Jimbo Kotaro. A children's supplement called Sakura, published in katakana, was included free with the 10th of June 1942 edition and later sold separately for one sen. The Straits Times name was restored on the 5th of September 1945 when British colonial rule returned.

• 7. Government, Press Holdings, and Editorial Control

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  After Singapore gained independence in 1965, The Straits Times shifted from its earlier anti-PAP and anti-independence stance to a broadly pro-PAP position. The transition was not purely organic. Following Lee Kuan Yew's criticisms of the paper's coverage after the 1979 by-elections and the 1980 general election, The Straits Times accepted S. R. Nathan, a government nominee and former Director of Internal Security, as its executive chairman. Nathan was later identified in the memoir OB Markers: My Straits Times Story by former editor-in-chief Cheong Yip Seng as the paper's first government-appointed "monitor", someone whose disapproval could block a reporter or editor from internal promotion.

  On the 30th of November 1984, the Singaporean government restructured the entire newspaper industry, consolidating all English-, Chinese-, and Malay-language papers under a new conglomerate called Singapore Press Holdings. A 2009 US diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks quoted Chua Chin Hon, then The Straits Times' bureau chief for the United States, as saying that SPH's editors had been groomed as pro-government supporters and ensured that local reporting adhered closely to the official line.

  The revolving door between the paper and the government has been well documented. The SPH chairman who preceded the media restructuring, Lee Boon Yang, was a former PAP cabinet minister. His predecessor Tony Tan had been Deputy Prime Minister. SPH CEO Alan Chan was a former top civil servant who had served as Principal Private Secretary to Lee Kuan Yew. Warren Fernandez, listed as current editor-in-chief, had been considered as a PAP candidate for the 2006 elections. Editors operated under what Cheong described as "out of bounds markers" defining which topics were permissible for public discussion.

  The paper's news website launched on the 1st of January 1994, placing it among the first newspapers in the world to go online. The site remained free until 2005, when a paid subscription became required for full access. As of July 2025 the parent company continued to exert editorial control and had expanded its collaborations with Chinese state media including Xinhua News Agency.

• 8. Awards, Archives, and Inflated Numbers

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  Since 2016, The Straits Times has presented the Singaporean of the Year award to a citizen whose contributions have had a significant impact on others in Singapore. The first recipient was Noriza A. Mansor, a Good Samaritan recognised for cleaning up after an elderly person who had lost bowel control in public in 2014. In 2020, the award was given collectively to the medical staff, volunteers, and other personnel who managed Singapore's COVID-19 response. For the 2025 edition, two new award categories were introduced: Young Singaporean of the Year, won by Amanda Yap, and International Impact, for individuals or organisations with significant global contributions.

  In July 2007, the National Library Board signed an agreement with Singapore Press Holdings to digitise the paper's archives going back to 1845. Those materials are held at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library and available to the public via microfilm.

  In 2023 a leak published on the socio-political website Wake Up, Singapore revealed that SPH Media had inflated its circulation figures in 2022 by between 85,000 and 95,000 copies daily across all its publications, representing a 10-12% overstatement of the reported daily average. The methods included counting copies that were printed and then destroyed, using fictitious counts, and double-counting subscriptions. A 2020 Reuters Institute survey of 15 media outlets found that 73% of Singaporean respondents trusted The Straits Times' reporting, placing it second only to Channel NewsAsia among local outlets. That trust was established long before the circulation scandal came to light.