Jom's Sudhir Vadaketh talks about a sea change in Singapore's media startup landscape

Jom has been on the Singapore media scene for less than five months. The digital magazine, as its co-founder Sudhir Vadaketh explains, is trying to fill a unique position in explaining Singapore through a critical eye to both local and foreign audiences. Perhaps more interestingly, it's on the scene at a time when government agencies are more open to engaging with small and independent media startups.

Find out more about Jom
https://www.jom.media/

Join as a member
https://www.jom.media/membership/

Connect with Sudhir on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sudhir-thomas-vadaketh-194629/

The transcript

Alan: Hey, this is Splice Pink. This is a podcast of quick conversations with people around the global media ecosystem from media startup founders, journalists, and funders to all the tech data and design folks.

Rishad: So today we have a somewhat newly minted media entrepreneur. Sudhir Vadaketh is a Singapore author, commentator, and journalist.

Rishad: And a year ago he co-founded Jom, which he describes as a digital magazine that covers arts, politics, and culture in Singapore.

Alan: Is that a right description still Sudhir? Yeah. I, I,

Sudhir: I, I think that's fair. We're a general interest magazine, a weekly digital on Singapore. At the moment, we want to expand across Southeast Asia one day, but at the moment, just Singapore, so that's right. Let's, let's

Alan: talk about Southeast Asia later. Can you explain who Jom is for?

Sudhir: Jomis for the audience that appreciates commentary, analysis about the news literary journalism, long form. We do a lot of long form journalism where we've just started getting into photo essays. and eventually podcast as well, and, and some video. So I guess, you know, if you think about media consumers, it'd be the same audience that the likes of the New Yorker or the economists or the ft kind of go after you know, not, not your typical sort of mass market daily news subscriber.

Rishad: So you've done stories around Singapore about stuff like politics, social mobility. I was reading up a little bit, you know, children's right to privacy, food and food cultures, art, housing, you know, Malay poets in Manhattan. BBFAs are what Westerners would call incels in Singapore. Slaughter houses in the UK , I find this fascinating.

Rishad: So I'm, I'm curious, as editor-in-chief for you, what makes a story a Jom story?

Sudhir: I think, I mean, at a broad level, a, as long as there's relevance to Singapore, it's interesting to us, you know, we, we, we've got such a broad remit that we actually spend a lot of time on curation every week. So, so what Rishad has just mentioned are some of the.

Sudhir: A combination of some of the shorter sort of blurbs that we do, which, which offer our opinion on events happenings in Singapore over the past week or two, but also some of our longer articles. I think you mentioned one or two of them. and we spend a lot of time basically figuring out what our audience might want to hear about when they think about Singapore.

Sudhir: You know, these are people on a Friday we think, who want a sort of a quick recap about what happened in Singapore. And, and it's not just reporting on the news, but they want analysis. They, they, they want our view, an opinion on what actually happened and why it matters. In a, in a short, succinct way,

Alan: can, can you talk a little bit about, about your audience? You know, what, what would be some of the. Personas, right? Are they living in Singapore? Are they Singapore is overseas, are they, you know, media consumers or are they politicians, even.

Sudhir: We haven't yet conducted a good reader survey. I think that's on the agenda for the next couple of months, but I, I can share anecdotal evidence of, of what I think our, our readership is.

Sudhir: This also, if, you know, I, I, I've been an independent writer. about 10 years. So I, I, I've got my own blog data for about 10 years, and I, I think from that roughly 10 to 15% of the audience is overseas. and the rest is in, you know, actually based in Singapore as far as the IP addresses go. Now, the overseas ones I, I guess, are mostly Singapore and diaspora who are based in places like Hong Kong, Australia, Malaysia, London, and the us tho.

Sudhir: Those are the popular places where, where I, I've tended to get a lot of readers. In terms of the profile, I think you know the, there, there are a few groups that, that, you know, Jom product, I guess sort of satisfies one again, diaspora who are far away, maybe not plugged into Singapore news day to day, but once a week they, they like that little snapshot, opinionated snapshot of what happened.

Sudhir: They want to keep up to date with what's going on in Singapore without necessarily being inundated by news every day. Who, who else might fit that profile? We've got a lot of interest from. Of course, you know, other Singaporean writers and analysts and, and, and anybody who's in that broad space of keeping up with s.

Sudhir: Inside the country, but also people like embassies, right? We, we've got a lot of clients from, from the different embassies. So, and, and, and, and it's quite nice. They, they regularly take us out for lunch or, or, or invite us to some of their sort of cocktail events at their embassies. So, so these are foreign, foreign diplomats based in Singapore.

Sudhir: Right. Who want to, for the same reasons, keep up to date with opinionated news of what's happening in Singapore. Right. Be beyond what the Straits Times, or, or, or the Motherships of the world might be telling them.

Rishad: So I'm curious to go again, you know, because we're spliced, we tend to ask a lot of questions about audience, you know.

Rishad: Sure. . And you know, in your recent memory, it doesn't have to be data or analytics, but what story recently stood out for your audience? What recently resonated?

Sudhir: In late October, we, we published a couple of pieces around the destruction of Dover forests. Now Dover Forest is a secondary forest in the western Midwestern part of Singapore.

Sudhir: it's one of the many forests, secondary forests that will be destroyed in order to make way for new public housing. And in Singapore, and stop me if this is too much detail , but in Singapore, there, there, there's, there's a, there's a lot of tension between, you know, the need to conserve our green areas, but also the need to provide affordable housing.

Sudhir: So, you know, it's, it's a never ending tension that we'll have. Housing, as you all know, is extremely expensive. In Singapore, it's gone up. Especially over the past couple of years, COVID has a lot of new money has come into Singapore. We, we approached that issue. We, we both wrote an essay and we also filmed a video eight minute video shot.

Sudhir: And we had a wonderful protagonist who actually lives in the area and, and he took us through Dover Forest. He's a, he's a conservationist and environmental. I think those two that, that sort of series the, the essay and the video together, those are very popular to a whole bunch of people, right?

Sudhir: Popular to people interested in green issues. It was also interesting to people who. Thinking about how to solve our public housing crisis in general. And, you know, a lot of younger people in Singapore are very concerned about whether they can ever afford to move out of Mommy and papa's bedroom.

Sudhir: Right. And, and I think so it, it, it also was interesting to that group of people and I think people felt that we, we, we also talked a bit about the whole public consultation process, which, which the protagonist had been involved. This is between members of the public and different arms of the government having a conversation about what to do and, and how that process is changing as well in Singapore to hopefully become a bit more consultative and, and, you know a bit more open to dialogue with members of the public.

Alan: I re I remember when you first launched your, your newsletter. This was August last year, right? And the first one, do you remember the headline for that?

Sudhir: Man. Actually, I don't, man, . It

Alan: was, it was a fantastic headline because it said, isn't it risky studying a magazine in Singapore, ?

Sudhir: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Sudhir: That is fantastic. Yeah.

Alan: What, you know, what, what have you learned from, you know, almost how many months now? I'll come do the math my head, but four months, I guess of doing this. What is it about the s. Space that makes it so unique, do you think, when it comes to your readers and and just the landscape, you know, overall,

Sudhir: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for reminding me of that. I, I, I think I was coming off a few months where I, I, I kind of felt a lot of, I don't wanna call it negativity, but, you know, I, I think feelings of concern for, for me, starting, starting a, a new media company in a, in a place that hasn't always been very hospitable to independent media.

Sudhir: As, as, as we all know now, my, my experience has actually just been uniformly. I'm happy to say now we, we had a little bit of a hiccup right at the start in terms of registering our business. So it took, took a bit long to register our business with Akra, which is the governing body in Singapore. But, but that was fine.

Sudhir: We had, you know, very open, honest conversations with the officers there, and I think their, their main concern was around funding, which, you know, at the end of the day is a concern for many countries around the world. Right. Worries about foreign funding, foreign interference in your local media. Lot of countries are facing this, so, so that was the only concern and once, once we had kind of ironed that out, it was fine.

Sudhir: Since then, you know, over the past few months, we actually have had really good interactions with different branches of the government. This is both in terms of when we request a comment from them. You know, so, so back back to that Dover Forest piece I was talking about earlier. We actually sent requests for comment to two different agencies.

Sudhir: One was H D B, the Housing Development Board, and the other was U R A, the Urban Redevelopment Authority. And, you know, very good conversations with them and, and we included, Their, their comments in our piece. And, and I, I'm kind of making the point because as, as Alan and Rishad well know, but maybe some of the listeners don't.

Sudhir: You know, if I, if I turn the clock back 10 years, independent media would never get a shout from, from any, any government agency, right? I mean, you, you, you'd, you'd spend hours writing emails and making phone calls and, and you know, there'd be no response. So, so there's actually been quite a sea change, I think in.

Sudhir: The government's desire to be responsive to independent media out outlets which is really encouraging. They may not treat every independent media outlet the same, but they've suddenly been quite, quite good to Jom. And the other. The other one last thing I I'd mentioned is around when we, when we had a factual error in one of our.

Sudhir: And we had a really good interaction with the Attorney Generals chambers. So, so we actually wrote about the A G C, which, you know, I guess everybody is a bit careful in writing about the A G C, but we, we wrote about the A G C and, and we said something critical about them, and we actually made a factual error on a, on a Friday.

Sudhir: And on Monday morning, they sent us very kind gracious email, you know dear Sudhir and the Jom team's, a factual error in your piece. And, and do you mind correcting it? And, you know, we corrected it. We, we put a correction notice up and that was all fine. You know, maybe sort of getting into this in a bit more detail than everybody else would appreciate.

Sudhir: But in, in, in Singapore, I, I, I do think there's been a bit of a change in terms of how the quote unquote establishment. One to actually deal with independent media. Hmm.

Alan: And I think they were probably trying to call you on your phone there just now, .

Sudhir: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Sorry about that. That's alright.

Alan: So I, I, I like how you describe this as a sea change and I, I have to agree.

Alan: I think over the years it feels like government agencies have been more responsive and, and. Accountable in that, on that front, right. When it comes to responding to journalist questions. You know, when, when you look out into the media space here, and this is your second headline that you wrote you said you remember the headline, the second headline for, for your second newsletter it said, how are you different from Rice and New Naratif?

Alan: Yep. Looking back now, do you feel like you've, you've sufficiently distinguished yourself as being different, you know, obviously different from from your competitors. Are

Sudhir: they even competitors to you? I, I think at one level everybody is a competitor. You know, I mean, that, that's the very generic, I guess, answer.

Sudhir: The broad view would be even, you know, video games on the phone are are a competitor to us in terms of attention, but more directly New Naratif and rise. The closest analogs because they also tend to do sort of longer form literary type journalism. Have we distinguished ourselves enough from them?

Sudhir: You know, I, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll kind of. Put New Naratif to the side a little bit because New Naratif has been going through a lot of changes and I think the market isn't quite sure yet what New Naratif is or is becoming. So I, I think at the moment, maybe Rice people still do compare us to Rice.

Sudhir: It's still an ongoing process in terms of getting the market to understand how we are different. I think certain. The writers and, and people in the journalistic space. And this is through conversations I've had with writers you know, contributors who come forward. I think they, they can now quite visibly see how, how, you know, their differences in the way we approach stories.

Sudhir: And I mean, if you ask me to define it, I, I would say the main difference is because of our business model. , right. So Rice is a advertising driven business model. Ours is a subscription based business model, which, you know, in my view, gives us a lot more latitude and space in the editorial process. Whereas with the advertising model, as everybody knows, there's, there's always a bit of an imperative to make the content attractive to as many eyeballs as possible.

Sudhir: You can look at specific pieces now that we have. So, so the b a. That Rishad mentioned earlier, rice has done a piece on BBFA as well, and so, so BBFA for listeners who don't know, stands for 'Bui Bui Forever Alone'. You know, Bui is Hokkien for 'fat' and 'Bui Bui Forever Alone' is a term used by a particular online community.

Sudhir: And, you know, somewhat like incel, I guess in, in, in the western world. And so RiceE did a piece on BBFA, which in, in many ways looked a lot more at the individual personalities and, you know, their behaviors and, and what they were up to. And, and Joe last month did a piece on BBFA, which was actually a computational analysis which, which one of our data scientists went through essentially looking.

Sudhir: The prevalence or BBFA activity online and also doing some really cool like word association type things, which were linking the term BBFA with other terms you know online that, that might give you, might give you an indication or misogyny or, or violence or, or, or other sort of interesting things that are going on in terms of the personalities.

Rishad: So I have a question about formats. How is Jom thinking of productising or thinking about formats? You have a newsletter, you have a website, you do, you do Instagram, telegram. You also have an upcoming print issue, which your membership page mentions. Do you have events in mind, do you think you, you mentioned a podcast.

Rishad: Talk to us about some of these.

Sudhir: So let's start with the print issue. We, you know, a lot of us love print, and I think in the long term, I hope that we can get to the stage where we do a monthly print issue, maybe a bimonthly print issue. But starting out now, we've committed to an annual print issue. From a revenue perspective, I, I don't know what that's gonna look like and you know, to what extent it'll be a revenue generator, but, but I think it can be both in terms of, of advertising and sales.

Sudhir: The way I see it is it's kind of gonna be a bit of a statement piece just in the first couple of years. So, so letting the audience know what we can do on print, we. commission, some print only stories. And I think we're gonna time it just before National Day probably. So that's, that's for print.

Sudhir: In terms of podcast, we, we've got a very exciting podcast series, actually, plan, I, I can't actually talk publicly much more about it because I think in terms of getting the sources to go on record, which, which I'm about to start doing over the next couple of months, it's, we, we, we, we've gotta be a little bit secretive about it, but I've, we essentially have a three four.

Sudhir: Podcast series plan. It is gonna be fairly political in nature. That, that's about all I can say. And we hope for it to launch. Within the next year to 18 months. So, so planning for that has just gotten underway. Now, again, from a revenue perspective, I'm not entirely sure I see it. I see it mostly as a sort of a marketing vehicle to just get the job name into a whole different set of potential listeners.

Sudhir: So we'll be doing some sort of like direct advertising for the Jom subscription product within the podcast. I don't think we'll be necessarily trying to like, approach advertisers or sponsors for our first podcast. You know, partly also cause it's a kind of an unproven product. So we're using mo using it mostly to, to drive Jom subscription traffic.

Sudhir: Let's

Alan: talk about that, that subscription traffic. Sure. So you basically have three different tiers, member supporter, patron. Do you want to quickly explain what, how these are different from each other? And, and of course talk about the pricing

Sudhir: as. It's just, you know differentiated by the level of closeness.

Sudhir: I, I guess in terms of the reader and the Jom team and Jom community. So the base one is a member, we, what we call member, which is $10 a month, 10 Singapore dollars a month. And that mostly gets you just access to all content, right? To all our payroll content. Now we've got a middle tier, which is called Supporter, which.

Sudhir: Is $25 a month, if I remember correct. , and there's a bit of a discount for annual purchase, and that gets you things like we've got a monthly, no monthly. We, we've got a periodic behind the scenes zoom call with journalists that's been fairly popular where, where sort of journalists talk about the craft, what, what, what goes into the, the writing and, and the design of, of individual pieces.

Sudhir: So, so that's an opportunity for readers who are interested to have a chat with journalists about how they do what they. We also offer discounts to our live events, which so far there's been one, a launch party. We, we do hope to have more actual in-person events this year. To your earlier point, R shadi and I, I see different forms of this, and I think it also gets you a copy of the annual print issue, the middle tier, and then we've got an upper tier, which we call Patron, which is $950 a year.

Sudhir: and this is so, you know, you can look at it, sort of a exclusive little community of people who actually want to help fund and subsidise independent media in Singapore. And, and, and for them. We, we offer recognition in our, in our print issue as well as a annual dinner for patrons. What's been quite exciting for us is that when we started out, August last year.

Sudhir: We just initially thought of having one tier, right? One single tier. After conversations with some of my friends who are in inter different digital subscription businesses around the world, we decided to like, you know, have different tiers to capture. Capture the higher paying end of the market. It's been successful in that 26% of our subscribers are on the opportunity.

Sudhir: I, I never expected that if, if we had this conversation in August last year, I, I, you know, the optimist in me would be like, I hope 10% comes from the second and third tier. Right? And I expect 90% from the, from the, from the, from the lower tier. But actually we've got 26% from the upper two tiers. So 74% members and, and 26% supporters and patrons.

Rishad: So, I have a question. If, if I get a job at Jom, would I be called a Jomalist?

Sudhir: Sorry. No, you, you, you, you, you, you would be called a Jomrade. Jomrade . What's Jomrade? I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a nod to our, our slightly leftist leanings. So, so, you know, not, not a comrade, but a Jomrade.

Sudhir: I love that .

Rishad: So listen, I mean, here's, you know, just to wrap things up, I just wanted to ask you, you know, about the. . By the way, congratulations on, on being pleasantly surprised with your membership or, or subscription figures. That's, that's delightful to hear,

you

Sudhir: know, sorry, if I can just skeptics. Yeah.

Sudhir: The, the, the ratio, I, I, I think in terms of the pure numbers, were, were just about, you know, we, we got six, about 600 payments subscribers now, and we want to get to 3000, so we're still some distance from that. But the, but the ratio, the, the split is, is looking really.

Rishad: Here's, here's your typical you know, big tech interview question.

Rishad: Where do you wanna see Jom in five years? If you had that success metric, that dream in mind, where would you see this?

Sudhir: So in five years, I hope we've got, in terms of format, we've got established podcast and video units in house. In terms of geography. In five years, I hope we. Made, at least our first overseas move, the most likely places for us are KL and Penang.

Sudhir: And that's partly because of talent partly because of access. You know, we've got people who are familiar with the markets and, and we know people there and, and, and, and what do I mean when I say overseas move? I think we want to move there and, and basically develop a a, a local, That can do the same thing in KL or Penang that, that, you know, Jom Singapore is doing in, in Singapore, providing a curated, opinionated product for people in that particular city.

Sudhir: You know, so, so not necessarily a KL outpost to, to be sending back KL stories for the Singapore and reader. I mean, there'll be a little bit of that. I, I think there'll be a little bit of like cross fertilization in terms of content, but it's mostly. Creating a dedicated team with the same principles that we have in place here for, for providing content for those cities.

Sudhir: So, so that's where we'd like to be, I think in five years.

Alan: Very good, Sudhir. Just to wrap things up, why don't you do a shout out and tell people where to go to be a member and how to be a member?

Sudhir: Yes please log on to jom.media/membership and you can pick one of the three tiers, whatever works for you.

Sudhir: And yeah, subscribe today to help support independent journalism in Singapore and to be a Jomrade!

Alan: All right, well that's a wrap for this episode of Splice Pink. If you like our conversations with people across the media ecosystem, and one more just hit subscribe and better yet, just share this with someone else as well.

Alan: And also, one more thing, get in touch with us. We're on splicemedia.com. Thank you, Sudhir.

Sudhir: Thanks

Rishad: Sudhir. All the best. Thank you.