Splice’s guide to your media future

Opening night of Splice Beta 2023, Old Chiang Mai Cultural Centre. All photographs by Hein Htet unless indicated.

This article was first published on Jom, a weekly digital magazine covering arts, culture, politics, business, technology and more in Singapore. Please consider signing up for a Jom membership.

by Sudhir Vadaketh
February 23, 2024

A former garment workers’ dormitory on a quiet Chiang Mai backstreet is an unlikely place to witness South-east Asia’s media rebirth. Last November, I was there to meet Sonny Swe, the co-founder of Frontier Myanmar, a news and business magazine whose strident independence since 2015 has won it the adoration of fans and the ire of the junta. Since the February 2021 coup, half of Frontier’s 50-odd person team has decamped to Chiang Mai, part of a larger Burmese exile community in the mountainous northern Thai town, just over 100km from the border.

Swe, in a blue top and glasses so orange they matched his sun-kissed pate, was standing in front of a white grilled gate with little t-shirt motifs, the only vestige of the garment factory hollowed out by the Covid-19 pandemic. In mid 2022, when the Frontier team took over the disused premises, they found inside only bunk beds and a heart-shaped bookshelf. They turned it into a co-working space, Greenhouse, that’s known for its distinctive green-painted walls, an abundance of natural light, and an almost eerie quietude.

Its little capsules and podcast rooms are insulated from the bustle of the adjoining cafe, Gatone’s Teashop. It serves an all-day Burmese breakfast, reminiscent of roadside fare, soothing the heartache and nostomania of many an exile. I slurped on nangyi thoke, a yummy chicken noodle dish, as Swe and I indulged in the chatter of South-east Asian hacks.

“The internet giants can make you broke, they can make you rich too,” he told me, referencing the capricious algorithms on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. “It’s like fire. It’s just about how you use it.” Burmese media wonks are acutely aware of the potential horrors of social media, following Facebook’s failure to curb disinformation and hate speech during the Rohingya crisis, arguably its worst-ever sin.

One of Swe’s colleagues dragged over a wooden stool and flipped open his laptop as the pungency of fermented fish wafted by. He showed me a media monitoring and sentiment analysis tool that Frontier had built. Originally designed to monitor misinformation and disinformation in Myanmar, the tool has been repurposed and commercialised for new clients, including embassies. There’s a lot of money to be made at the intersection of technology and journalism, Swe said. Frontier’s goal is to emulate the likes of Malaysiakini and (Filipino) Rappler, two of South-east Asia’s new media darlings.

When a group of Western tourists walked into Gatone’s, he momentarily put on his maître d’ hat to welcome them. This fluidity of roles has evolved in tandem with the space’s transformation. A former workers’ dormitory is now Greenhouse and Gatone’s: part newsroom lab, part co-working space, part Burmese tea shop.

Frontier and Swe, with their irrepressible adaptability, hunger for growth, focus on profitability, sense of community, resistance to oppression, and diverse product offerings—centuries-old nangyi thoke to spiffy web tools—are in many ways the poster childs of Splice Media, a Singaporean media advisory and consulting firm run by Alan Soon and Rishad Patel. From helping Frontier build a membership programme in 2019—part of their transition away from advertising and magazine sales—to encouraging their brick-and-mortar expansion in Chiang Mai, Splice has been a partner to Frontier’s incredible eight-year journey thus far.

That Monday meeting with Swe was the beginning of my week-long exposure to the Splice community, who’d gathered in Chiang Mai for “Splice Beta”, a three-day indie media festival now in its fourth edition. Among the 280 people from 57 countries were some familiar regional names, such as Nabilah Said from Singapore-founded Kontinentalist, Tom Grundy from Hong Kong Free Press, and Premesh Chandran, co-founder and former CEO of Malaysiakini, and now executive director of Open Society–Asia Pacific, also known as (the financier) George Soros’s foundation.

There were also attendees from much further away, including Russian journalists who’d fled Moscow for Spain, from where they can safely beam back accurate reporting on Ukraine via Telegram and YouTube. To be sure, safety is a relative concept, a point heartbreakingly reinforced by the recent news of Alexei Navalny’s death. Unlike the Burmese and the Hong Kongers, the Russians, replete with stories of bugged phones, burner phones, and near escapes, did not want to be named in this piece.

Those three communities were part of a panel on “How we can help exile media together”, one of 27 presentations at the Chiang Mai University. Others ranged from business strategy and funding to building a mental health journalism startup. Ancillary sessions included speed networking and free profile photographs taken by Singaporean Zakaria Zainal. It collectively felt like a modern journalism crash course.

Arguably the most fascinating aspect of it all is that Splice is a Singaporean firm. How could our illiberal city-state—one scarcely known for its media freedoms, vibrancy, and competency—have produced such a cog in the machinery of modern, independent media?

Your Tita Baby and Jen Aquino conducted a session called, "How journalists and a drag content creator are working together to fight disinfo in the Philippines".

Soon, 50, and Patel, 53, first met each other in 2010, through their wives, Bridgit O’Donovan and Shefali Srinivas respectively. At that point, still in their 30s, they were at the tail end of their early careers: Soon’s in journalism and Patel’s in news product and design. (Disclosure: I’ve known Soon since he was an editor at Yahoo!, and he’s since occasionally offered me advice, including at Jom.) It was a tumultuous time for the global media industry, with the broader digital revolution disrupting traditional advertising-based business models, even as it changed the way people consumed news—the shift to smartphones, apps, and shorter-form content (for shorter attention spans) was well underway.

Soon and Patel spent the next few years doing consulting projects while pondering the industry’s future, occasionally with each other. They recognised that “the media space is a mess”, but that its evolution was being restrained partly by power dynamics. Large publishers and broadcasters still had much influence, and were beholden to antiquated models. “You have to work in our newsroom for five years before you even get the right to say, ‘Hey’,” Soon said, mimicking a traditionalist. “One of the things that we were both really excited about, like, what is this change that needs to happen?”

In 2015, Splice was born in Coq & Balls, a bistro in Tiong Bahru (and one whose name still animates the punsters in them). Patel doodled a logo on a notebook, showed it to Soon, and suddenly their swirling vortex of thoughts had manifested into something tangible on paper. “It’s a map. It’s a hierarchy. It’s a layout. It’s a system,” Patel said, while pointing at the eight-year-old drawing in his notebook that would evolve into Splice’s current logo.

“What really changed, the big milestone here was when we got a grant from Facebook [of US$50,000, or S$67,000]. This was one of the first grants that they gave out as part of the journalism programme,” Soon said. “Prior to that, it was just me [at Splice], making the little dribs and drabs of consulting fees, which is enough to pay for myself. But, for both of us to work on this together required some kind of runway.”

It quickly became apparent that “this was not just a side hustle”, Patel said, but rather an intentional, for-profit, private limited that would pay their salaries while affording them the creative and social space their lives needed. “One of the first questions we asked each other was how much you want to make a month,” Soon said. “Coincidentally, we both had the same number…this doesn’t have to be a 10-million-dollar company or whatever, it just needs to pay us that salary that we want every month.”

Since launching, they’ve never failed to pay themselves, and are both officially on leave every December. “This is fucking life, yeah,” they said, almost in unison, less self-congratulatory than a recognition that work-life boundaries are non-existent.

To cover their own costs—salaries and, a distant second, software—Splice’s three main revenue streams are consulting, training, and events. They publish two free weekly newsletters, both heavy on opinion and dry wit: Soon’s Splice Slugs, a global media intelligence round-up, and Patel’s Splice Frames, which focuses on product and design. They collectively have about 3,500 subscribers and register an impressive 50 percent “open rate”, one of the key metrics in the flourishing, if crowded, newsletter space.

As an avid reader of both, I wanted to understand their passion and process a bit more. Soon responded that he “hates” the chore of writing the newsletter. “We do it anyway because that’s the stuff that gets us in people’s inboxes on a weekly basis.” Sensing that they’d disappointed a fellow writer, Patel clarified: “You know, ‘hate’ is a strong word…and I mean exactly that. I think we hate it. But I think we love that the whole point of doing this is to deliver something that’s relevant and useful.”

Their newsletters function as what marketers call the “top of the funnel”, generating some 90 to 95 percent of Splice’s leads. Even as readers everywhere contend with newsletter fatigue—can anybody possibly keep up?—there are clearly still profitable niches to exploit.

Their overall business seems to have attained some happy equilibrium. The Splice Beta festival, their flagship event sponsored by the likes of AFP, Google, and Luminate, contributes up to 50 percent of their operating budget. “If we do it well,” Soon emphasised. But it took a while for the business to get here. Early hiccups included an ill-fated plan to bring on board two others, and later, once they’d established a name for themselves, contending with the stream of well-meaning advisors, granters and would-be investors with radical growth plans. Co-working space and cafe in the day, restaurant and bar at night, Patel said, lampooning the sandwiches and tacos that startup gurus believed Splice needed as part of their media offering.

These overtures carried on till January 2020. Then the pandemic hit. Soon and Patel breathed a sigh of relief that theirs was a remote-first business with no physical space.

“There are still a lot of people who give us this kind of advice, right? You guys really need to ‘scale’, they use that word. And I think we, in 2023, have an aversion to that word, because I think a lot of people don’t know what that even means,” said Soon.

“From the media kind of perspective, it’s always scale, the output, make more hotdogs. So therefore, you need more hot dog machines, and you need factories that make them. That’s often the view that they have. And when Rishad and I talk about scale, it’s not what we mean. It’s [more] like, how do we get more people into this community so that we can serve them?”

Putting the broad journalistic community at the centre of their business changes the way Soon and Patel think about financial sustainability. Because Splice has relative stability amidst an ocean of struggling media startups, they worry less about their own running costs than their mentees’ rents and wages. “We get to be able to do that because we get to be secure about our own [costs],” said Soon. “And we get to be insecure about the fact that we have no other responsibility. It doesn’t shut down your scope of response. It widens it to the whole world, man.”

This broadened scope occasionally involves paying for bootstrapping South-east Asian journalists to plug into global media communities, such as the annual International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Patel, at this moment in the interview more excitable than I’ve ever seen, said that they are “incredibly privileged” to have the resources to do so. “We take them because we decide we can. So we will pay for their tickets, we will pay for their hotel, we’ll do it, we take them, and at the end of that we don’t need, like, a tweet in exchange or a LinkedIn thought leader posting or any of that bullshit.”

Rishad Patel eats mohinga prepared by Trish of Bamama, which specialises in contemporary Burmese cuisine. Photograph by Jay Wong for Jom

Along the way, the philosophical underpinnings of their approach to new media became apparent, encapsulated by what is now part of their mission statement: “We believe that a healthy viable media ecosystem requires a broader definition of media and obsessive focus on serving users needs and monetary value from that service.”

Implicit in this is that the very definition of media must change, partly because it constrains our imaginations, said Soon. He believes that people tend to have specific notions of three sectors: journalism, news, and media. “And because we do, and it’s a very narrow notion, we are unwilling to explore new areas to go into, and this has held the industry back in the last 10 years of this transformation.”

He described the communities of “creators, YouTubers, Substackers, TikTokkers, Instagrammers” who have influenced the journalism, news, and media sectors in recent times, even as traditionalists shun them. “Here we are, 2023, we see elections being swayed by people who provide information. Not our kind of information. We don’t like their practices. We don’t like their principles. But at the same time, we’re not at the same table, because we said, ‘You’re not good enough to be in this community.’”

Patel dismissed what Splice sees as some of the shibboleths of media, including the separation of editorial and business. The wall between the so-called church and state has been gospel for many of us, on the grounds that the independence of a media outlet’s editorial must never be compromised by commercial considerations. Over the past decade, many commentators, observing how new media has disregarded, if not completely torn down, this wall, have also predicted its end. One new media mantra insists that editors must have their pulse on commercial signals precisely so that content, in an era of speed and engagement, can be responsive to the customer’s actual desires.

After I expressed my own discomfort about having to be both CEO and editor of Jom, given our startup’s limited resources, Soon returned to first principles. “I think one of the questions we need to ask is, how did we come about in building this wall between both sides? And why did we have that? The assumption inherent in that is that this is the only way to maintain independence on both sides.”

It never even fully worked, Soon argued, pointing to links between Rupert Murdoch’s conservatism and The Wall Street Journal’s positions on issues. (In “Murdoch’s best friend”, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta described the “anticipatory censorship” that afflicts all “Murdoch editors”.) Soon said that there are other ways to ensure editorial’s independence, including through extensive disclosures.

“The tech reviewer community has gotten to a point where the level of disclosures at the start of each video is better than I think I’ve seen. So, they right off the bat will tell you, ‘This new laptop was sent to us by Dell. They did not see this review. It’s going out right now. They made no expectations of how this review is written. And at the end of this, I’m sending the laptop back to them. I am not keeping it.’

So all of these things, they go out of their way to do this. But also the community holds them in check. So the community very often would say, ‘Oh, how could you have missed five glaring faults of this laptop?’…their goal is not to get free laptops, their goal is to build a business where they are seen to be highly credible, highly legitimate sources of information themselves.”

Soon and Patel have distilled their approach into a pithy motto. “Media used to be content-centred, ad-driven, and text-based,” said Patel. “We’re now saying that modern media is user-centred, demand-driven, and interest-based.”

Frontier’s pivot from ads and traditional subscriptions to a membership programme is illustrative of this. Their call to action: “We are building a community based on independent journalism in Myanmar. Join us.” The actual journalistic content on Myanmar is decentred from the offering, in favour of the users. Behind-the-scenes e-mails and events are all meant to foster this community. Many other media outlets around South-east Asia, including Jom and Kontinentalist, have introduced similar elements into our offerings.

Other novel creations that have been influenced by this obsession with the user and interests include Noodle, a Telegram community for those in gender reporting, which it defines as “stories by women (so think: representation of women and gender non-conforming people in the media industry), stories about women, and stories about patriarchy.” Born at a lunch in Splice Beta 2022, Noodle is a place where journalists can share job listings, amplify each other’s work, ask questions, find potential interviewees, and generally discuss best practices in gender reporting.

So while the likes of Frontier and Kontinentalist practise, in many ways, traditional journalism in a digital age, there are numerous others, including Noodle and Splice, who are almost the supporting cast, leveraging digital technologies to support the overall transformation. But does all this really represent the future of journalism? At the risk of sounding trite, we are probably far too early in the process for anybody to really know.

Every other week brings fresh news of layoffs and predictions of industry-wide demise. As we contend with all manner of forces and competitive threats, from social media algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to long-term secular changes in how people want to spend their time (video games?), it can often seem like we’re all on some wild rollercoaster ride to nowhere.

“[The news] sure is depressing. Really drags me down,” Soon messaged me a few weeks ago. For all the excitement about the future of the media, until a string of successful and profitable startups emerge from the broader Splice community, we’ll still be scratching our heads. Are we all just drunk on the same Kool-Aid?

User-centred. Demand-driven. Interest-based. These slogans of the revolution echoed around Chiang Mai University that week. Soon and Patel presented themselves in a carefully curated way, offering sartorial symbolism to this shift from old to new media. Poking fun at traditional media conferences, full of white guys in suits up on stage, they boasted of their Uniqlo threads and the festival’s diversity, including with gender: almost 55 percent of attendees were female and there were as many female presenters (48 percent) as male. These were part of broader efforts to ensure that every person, including single-person newsletter writers struggling to pay the bills, feels at home. It was a decidedly unconference-y “festival”.

Not everyone got the memo. One of the more spiffily dressed attendees was Ankur Paliwal, the founder and managing editor of queerbeat, “an independent collaborative journalism project focused on deeply and accurately covering LGBTQIA+ persons, in their voice, in India.” He shared harrowing stories of growing up queer in a still traditional Hindu-dominated society. “I became an expert at making myself invisible,” he said. Buoyed by the support from India and elsewhere—over 50 percent of subscribers surveyed don’t want benefits, but simply like the cause—he’s started training many first-time queer writers, tackling stories that can be both uplifting and heartbreaking: one is about older queer Indians forced to “go back into the closet” when they enter old-age homes.

One high-profile attendee was Gina Chua of Semafor, probably the most senior Singaporean journalist anywhere and, according to The New York Times, perhaps the most senior transgender journalist in the US. Her two sessions—one on transitioning genders and joining a startup after 60, the other on the promise and perils of AI in journalism—saw attendees filling the room well in advance.

The word geek in me was particularly enthralled by Chua’s argument that we’ll soon all be using non-binary pronouns in our work. (Or, rather, in our English work, given that many South-east Asian languages use third-person, gender-neutral pronouns.) She recalled the prevailing journalistic customs of the 1980s-90s, when writers still referred to single women as “Ms” and married ones as “Mrs”. But the industry quickly realised that a person’s marital status is almost always inconsequential to a story. Chua believes that the same is about to happen with gender.

“And the idea of a singular ‘they’, if you think about it, is to create a world where gender doesn’t matter. Except in circumstances where it really does, right? I mean, if I’m going on the operating table, yeah, I want the surgeon to know if I’ve got a uterus or not, but other than that it doesn’t really matter,” she argued. “And so [let’s assume] you’ve got ‘Lee Smith, CEO of a company’. And on second reference, who gives a shit? Is Lee a man or a woman, or something else, doesn’t really matter, right?”

No, it doesn’t. In the preceding four paragraphs, if I’d used ‘they’ for Paliwal and Chua, nothing would have been lost. On the contrary, as we ponder our common humanity, something might have been gained.

Splice Beta’s welcome party was held at the Old Chiang Mai Cultural Center. Once the city’s repository of northern Thailand’s Lanna culture, its verdant grounds now host any number of people and cultural activities, including South-east Asia’s indie media literati.

As the dusk sky darkened, my eyes were drawn to the yellow and purple fairy lights strung between hardwood trees. Below one glittering juncture was a tuktuk painted in pink, the festival’s automotive avatar, representing, perhaps, a bootstrapped, jerry-rigged, all-welcoming and relentless motoring into our media future. (“Tuktuk chic is the best chic” is a tagline on Splice's merch store.)

Nearby, Soon and Patel, in fitted t-shirts and shorts that younger men might have found daunting, were scanning name tags and handing them out as attendees sauntered in. Even with scores of volunteers around, the creators couldn’t let go of their welcome table. We felt the love.

After grabbing a can of beer from a bucket of ice, I ambled slowly through the morass of Splicers. The newbies were marvelling at the festival’s pink-fabric totes. The famished made a beeline for Burmese snacks. The entrepreneurs were jostling for an audience with Open Society’s Chandran.

I finally made it to the makeshift stage, where I was met by the feverish energy of four Malaysians. “We play the gayest shit. And in Malaysia, you know, gay shit is heavily censored. But we don’t give a fuck,” said Faris Saad, the lead of Shh…Diam!, which calls itself a “Hemsem Queer Band”. The jazz-metal-punk ensemble, from a country where sodomy has been elevated to political stagecraft, seemed to revel in the freedom of the Splice-infused moonlight. “I wanna place of my own; I want to fuck all the time,” he later wailed, to more than a few empathetic nods.

Their riveting performance was interrupted when Soon and Patel walked gingerly up, to more than a few curious stares. “We are the guys,” they said diffidently, drawing cheers of both recognition and wonder. This low-key Chinese and Indian duo is behind this? They vanished as inconspicuously as they had appeared. The Splice movement, it seemed clear, had eclipsed them, had become something bigger than any person could embody.

Faris returned to ramp up the energy levels. “It’s really hot. I’m gonna take my shirt off,” he said, shifting our attention to his toned torso, fluorescent green shorts, and black Crocs. “Everybody is welcome to take their shirts off. This is a safe space.”

It was the second time that evening that Faris, a former business writer, had co-opted a contemporary social justice (and journalistic) concept for comedic effect. “We feel horses are under-represented,” he had earlier said. “So this is for the horses.”

South and South-east Asia’s ethnic, linguistic, religious, and geographic diversity—glorious as it is—is often framed as an impediment, as producing sites of socio-political contestation that prevent deeper continental integration, of the sort that say, China, the EU or the US enjoy.

Yet, all at Splice Beta in Chiang Mai were conjoined by our dedication to our craft, and like journalists of yore, were finding communion and meaning in our shared resistance against oppressive structures—whether exploitative Singaporean capitalism, the Burmese junta, heteronormative social norms in India, words that confine our identities, or the old, white male version of what the media is supposed to be.

Splice Beta, like the Angkor Photo Festival and other regional ground-up movements, is an exemplar of South-east Asia’s diversity, a demonstration of how connectedness occurs across borders in the most elemental of ways. In a world where ordinary people are increasingly disillusioned with traditional political machinations, and sceptical of the nation-state system’s ability to address transnational issues like climate change, these are the communities and movements from which real, sustainable ideas for systemic change may arise.

Even as we all still agonise about the future of the media, and whether we’ll actually make it, there’s much to appreciate about this community. Splicers are the sandal- and tote-bag-wearing antidotes to the pageantry of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ pow-wows. The idea that elderly men in flowery batik shirts must preside over and negotiate the region’s future in ineffectual, back-room dealings is passé. South-east Asia’s real energy is flowing elsewhere, in spaces where all who pine for an inclusive, fair future feel welcome.

Even the horses.

Sudhir Vadaketh is Jom's editor-in-chief. For this piece, he's also indebted to many others he met in Chiang Mai, including Hillary Leung, Kirsten Han, Jhesset Enano, Mili Semlani, Nyi Nang, Yao-Hua Law and Yan Naung Oak.

Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on Jom’s “Letters to the editor” page.

This article was first published on Jom, a weekly digital magazine covering arts, culture, politics, business, technology and more in Singapore. Please consider signing up for a Jom membership.