Last weekend, I (Karen) was in the audience for Ruby’s panel at Singapore Art Book Fair about the Politics of Print in Singapore's Independent Media Scene. Ruby gave a great summary of the main points she spoke about in the panel in the last issue – I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t.
For this week’s newsletter I wanted to touch on something else Ruby brought up during the panel: that one significant reason that Mynah is a print magazine is that we have found that readers can and will pay, in our case, $28 for a print product (if that’s you, thank you for your support!). That’s revenue we need in order to pay people who contribute to the magazine’s creation – writers, fact-checkers, photographers, illustrators, etc – to properly remunerate their labour, but also to support the independent publishing ecosystem we’re in by circulating funds and money.
Just days before the panel, Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull published a story titled ‘The Print Magazine Revival of 2024’, about the trend of US publishers framing the magazine as a luxury good for well-heeled audiences – who are also a desirable consumer base for advertisers. It also gets into how print publications are in some ways a haven from the irritants and frictions now commonplace within digital publishing – disruptive paywalls, creepy algorithmic ads – and how audiences’ and advertisers’ continuing affection for the medium means it endures… albeit as a prestige product that’s prized more for its marketing potential than as a means of education or entertainment.
The picture that Mull painted in her Bloomberg analysis rings true for me, someone who has worked on nearly every issue of Mynah to date and also helps put together a regular, limited-edition print magazine as part of her day job. But it doesn’t necessarily ring new for me, a millennial who came of age online and whose media diet has always included some form of free or easily accessible digital news – and for whom print looked like the expensive, imported music magazines I bought at Kinokuniya or Borders as a teenager.
One old chestnut about the beauty of print is that it allows you to have something tangible, to savour as you hold in your hands. And at Mynah we do enjoy playing with the physical form of print – over the years we have become more ambitious with it, not merely to reward our readers’ investment, but also to carve out space for us to experiment. In our most recent issues, we’ve had inserts for stories that bend our rule on longform prose – for instance Nuraliah Norasid’s short stories of speculative fiction, and Teo Kai Xiang’s game Paper Trails.
For me, though, the romantic whimsy and aesthetic possibilities of print ultimately take a backseat to its sturdy, instrumental usefulness. (Some) people still pay for print (for now). Making this magazine takes enormous work, and it’s important to us that we fairly compensate contributors for that work and try to raise our payscale over time. We don’t take grants and are currently a fully reader-funded publication – we want to make a magazine that you want to read.
If you’re another creator within the world of independent print publishing, in Singapore or elsewhere, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and what you’ve found works for you.
Mynah Trivia League Season 1 Round 2 Answers
The seed that Khong Guan’s factory manager said they used to dye their biscuits “an egg yolk colour” is not mustard, as many of you thought, but annatto, also known as the lipstick plant. Shoutout to mocha who gave us an uncommon guess: gardenia.
Former PM Lee Hsien Loong alluded to cockles – or hum in Hokkien – in the 2006 National Day Rally with the phrase “mee siam mai hum”. Mee siam, of course, doesn’t have cockles to begin with. His press secretary apparently later clarified that he had meant to say “laksa mai hum”. Sure.
The beloved Deepavali snack that gets its name from the Tamil word for ‘twist’ is murukku.
Mynah Trivia League Season 1 Round 3 Questions
Here are three questions about Singapore’s most famous primate, inspired by last week’s dramatic Choa Chu Kang recapture of Mykel, the black-and-white colobus monkey.
Who made the call to the Singapore Zoo in 1993, asking if they could shut so Michael Jackson could visit Ah Meng? Hint: you may recognise his name from the last year’s headlines.
Who was the actress who accompanied Jackson in his audience with Ah Meng?
The rendezvous between the King of Pop and the Singaporean tourism icon did not in fact take place in the zoo itself. Where did Michael Jackson and Ah Meng meet?
(you can also reply this email with your answers!)
Submissions close at noon (Singapore time) on Sunday, 10 November.
Mynah Trivia League Season 1 Leaderboard
We have a three-way tie at the top of the leaderboard now: Tenar, C and Bonus Round, with four points each. The rest of the leaderboard can be found here. Thank you for playing!