You've seen the page 1, but what was inside the paper that day? Here's The New Paper's 1997 General Election polling day coverage

You have probably seen this image of Workers' Party secretary-general Pritam Singh holding up a copy of The New Paper page one in Parliament yesterday.

Pritam Singh clash with S Iswaran over funding, editorial independence of SPH's new media entity

Posted by AsiaOne on Monday, May 10, 2021

Here's a close-up of the page:

It's from 2 January 1997, the day Singaporeans cast their vote in the 1997 General Election and more than a decade before I joined the paper.

This image of the TNP page one has been circulating online long before yesterday, but no one ever showed what was actually inside the paper. A case of judging a book by its cover perhaps?

I was curious enough that I found these pages from that day's TNP in the NLB online archives.

Sorry, I didn't look up the football pages.

To recreate more of that 90s vibe, here are the No. 1 songs that week in the US and UK.





The New Paper editor at the time was PN Balji, who ironically wrote this commentary for Yahoo:

"The government, the biggest stakeholder in the media business, needs to relax its vice-like grip on The Straits Times....

Posted by Yahoo Singapore on Monday, May 10, 2021