Breakfast Network

» see breakfastnetwork.sg as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Singapore's internet is a different object from the one I grew up on, and the difference is not the technology. Turkey has its own long record of the state deciding what a website is allowed to be, so a government reaching for a news site is not an unfamiliar shape to me. What is unfamiliar here is the instrument. Nobody blocked Breakfast Network. Nobody arrested anyone. A regulator sent over a registration form with a deadline on it, and the site chose to stop existing rather than fill it in.

Bertha Henson had been an associate editor at The Straits Times and left the paper in May 2012 after twenty-six years there. She started Breakfast Network in early 2013 as a community-led news and commentary site, funded out of her own pocket. It ran with at least one full-time paid staffer and a rotating bench of volunteer contributors, and it covered Singapore politics with the tone of someone who had spent a career inside the establishment press and now did not have to clear anything with anyone.

On 26 November 2013 the Media Development Authority notified the site that it had to register under the Broadcasting Class Licence scheme. The rule applied to sites reporting on Singapore news, and registering meant handing over the identities of key personnel along with a full account of where the money came from. It also meant undertaking never to accept funding from abroad. Henson had taken no foreign money. The objection was not to the disclosure of a fact but to the arrangement the form set up.

She asked for a month's extension. The MDA gave her a week, moving the deadline to 17 December. A month was not required, it explained, because the forms were straightforward.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the week it took ~

Henson announced on 9 December that Breakfast Network would suspend the website. The following day she posted her reasoning: the sticking point was the company. Breakfast Network Pte Ltd was a corporate entity, which is what pulled it into the licensing regime in the first place, and complying meant accepting a permanent condition on a business she had built to be independent.

The site's front page was replaced with the words "kitchen closed". She initially intended to keep posting on Facebook, on the reading that the license covered the website rather than the social accounts. The MDA closed that door on 13 December, stating that the company could not operate on any internet platform at all. On the 16th Henson announced she was winding up the company itself.

~ what the rule actually did ~

No content was ever found objectionable. No article was taken down by order. The regime worked by making an ordinary administrative burden expensive enough to refuse, and the refusal did the closing. That is a quieter mechanism than a block and it leaves a much thinner record, because there is no censored article to point at afterwards.

Singapore's licensing framework had been extended to news websites earlier in 2013 and had already drawn objections from local bloggers who read it as a way to bring the independent web under the same rules as broadcast. Breakfast Network is the case those objections had been describing in the abstract, arriving about six months later with a real site attached.

~ the long tail ~

Henson did not leave journalism. She launched The Middle Ground in 2015, a subscription-supported Singapore news site, and shut that one down in 2017 for the ordinary reason of not enough revenue. She kept writing and later published books on Singapore's elections.

Breakfast Network lasted less than a year and produced no famous scoop. It is worth a marker anyway, because it is the clearest demonstration of what the class license was for. A site with one paid employee and no foreign money could be closed by a form, and the closing looked, from outside, entirely voluntary.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »