Straits Times VW Charity Auction

[Barney]

Taken from VAGSG forum. Want to post this thread to highlight how ridiculous how things are getting :

The charity proceeds go towards paying ST to give their newspapers to poor families for free?

This sound so strange.

AsiaOne

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 SINGAPORE - The Straits Times (ST) and Volkswagen Group Singapore are teaming up for the sixth year as part of ST's readers engagement and community outreach.

Since 2007, Volkswagen has been sponsoring a car each year as a contest prize for readers of ST.

This year, it is donating a Volkswagen CC ( 1.8 TSI ), worth $107,500 (without COE, road tax, registration fee and insurance), for a charity auction being organised by ST in conjunction with its upcoming 167th anniversary.

The bid will start from $80,000, in increments of $1,000. All the proceeds from the auction will go towards sponsoring one-year subscriptions to ST for some 1,000 low-income families. A yearly subscription to the ST costs about $300.

Dr Zeno Kerschbaumer, managing director of Volkswagen Group Singapore, presented the car to ST editor Warren Fernandez this morning at the SPH News Centre in Toa Payoh North.

Said ST editor Warren Fernandez: "We at ST are delighted to partner with Volkswagen once again for this worthwhile project. Those who bid for this car will help drive our efforts to reach out and support the less well-off in our community.

"We want to give the young in these families a precious gift: access to information and a window to the world and all its possibilities. That will help them get ahead in life. We sincerely believe a daily copy of the ST delivered to their homes will do that."

Said Dr Zeno Kerschbaumer, managing director of Volkswagen Group Singapore: "It is our privilege to be partnering The Straits Times for the sixth year in succession, and we are thrilled that our cooperation in this year's Straits Times-Volkswagen STAR Auction will bring together Singaporeans from all walks of life."

"Volkswagen is a brand which over the years has become very much a part of people's lives in Singapore, just like The Straits Times. Not only will the auction winner enjoy driving the stylish Volkswagen CC four-door coupe, he or she will be benefitting hundreds of needy Singaporean families. I hope readers will bid generously for this great cause."

http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%...29-349123.html

[Barney]

The purpose is to keep the papers and sell for tens of dollars after a year? Where to store one year of papers? Corridor?

I think they need to go back to school! Maslow hierarchy of needs!!!

http://kirstenhan.me/2012/06/02/aiyah-straits-times-pwease-lor/

Aiyah Straits Times, pwease lor!

The Straits Times (ST) recently announced that they would be auctioning a Volkswagen car to raise money to buy one-year subscriptions of ST for 1000 low-income families.

This is what ST’s editor Warren Fernandez said about this act of “charity”:

“We want to give the young in these families a precious gift: access to information and a window to the world and all its possibilities. That will help them get ahead in life. We sincerely believe a daily copy of the ST delivered to their homes will do that.”

This has come under heavy fire from Singaporeans. The Moodmeter on this article is at over 90% “disgusted”. People have pointed out the following:

1. The car is donated to ST by Volkswagen (read: ST neh pay for it!)

2. Instead of auctioning the car and letting the money go directly to the low-income families, ST is taking the money and providing 1000 families with one-year subscriptions of their paper (i.e. increasing their circulation).

3. Do low-income families even want ST?

In a response to “netizens” (again, characterising the criticism as coming from a faceless group of keyboard warriors, rather than from Singaporeans and maybe even ST readers), Warren Fernandez said in a post on ST’s Facebook page:

From interacting with these families, we learnt that with the growing income gap in society comes a digital and information divide. In other words, those from better off households have an edge because they have access to information and knowledge to help them get ahead.

…

Providing 1,000 household with subscriptions for a year would cost about $300,000. To make this happen, we set out to raise the funds and approached our longstanding partners for their help.

For the past six years, Volkswagen has kindly donated a car, which has been given as a prize in a lucky draw for ST readers. This year, we decided that instead of this, we would do something more meaningful, which would benefit more people.

We decided to auction the car to raise some funds to help the less well-off in our society. The auction of the VW CC car is expected to raise about around $110,000. ST will provide the rest of the funds to pay for this project.

Several points:

1. $300k is the sales price of the subscriptions. But what is the cost price? Is ST still making a profit if the subscriptions are given for $110k?

2. $110k is the amount that is expected to be raised. But let’s say things go much better than planned, and the auction brings in more than $110k. Let’s say it raises $200k? What happens then? Does that mean that ST gets to pocket $90k more than they anticipated? Or would that $90k go directly to the low-income families? What if by some miracle they raise more than $300k? Would the ST then have sold 1000 subscriptions for an even higher price than usual?

3. Mr Fernandez has repeated over and over that an ST subscription is going to provide information and education for low-income families, and it will allow them to “get ahead in life”.

This is a rich claim to make when people are criticising ST – along with other mainstream media press – for biased and/or skewed reporting, or just bad reporting in general. (See here for Stephanie Chok’s awesome take-down of a particularly fawning article about Ong Ye Kung.)

It is highly unlikely that ST will give people the “information and knowledge” to “get ahead in life”, mainly because ST rarely encourages the innovative and critical thinking that is so crucial to all of us today. So many of us read ST throughout our childhood and school days (forced by English, Social Studies and GP teachers), only to later discover that we’ve not been told the whole story.

Serious issues – the death penalty, migrant worker rights, freedom of speech, etc. – that deserve to be highlighted, questioned and discussed more publicly are either not covered, or covered in such a way that people don’t have balanced information that allows them to decide for themselves. (See here – scroll to the fourth page – for a piece I wrote in 2010 about ST’s selective coverage of the death penalty.)

Letters to the ST Forum are edited in ways that change the writer’s meaning.

Coverage of the national confederation of unions – an important body that makes decisions affecting the lives of Singaporean workers – is not investigative or hard-hitting… it is sponsored by the union itself.

Will a one-year subscription of such a paper really help people “get ahead in life”? Also, what happens when the one year is up? Are the families then expected to pay to continue the subscription?

4. Did ST even ask if these families want a subscription? Perhaps they already get to read ST, either in public libraries or in cafes, or borrowed from friends. Perhaps the reason they don’t have ST is because they don’t want it.

Assuming that you know the needs of the low-income group without actually consulting them is not only pointless, but also insensitive. Just because they may be poorer than us doesn’t mean that we automatically know what is best for them. There’s a sense that ST is out to “save the poor people” by providing them with newspapers – but will this actually help them? Or are you just causing old newspapers to pile up in their homes?

I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with low-income families, even people who are/have been homeless. Not a single one ever went, “Oh, if only I had ST!” The fact is, if they want to read the newspaper, there are places that they can go to do so. The lack of ST is not what is holding them back.

Things that are preventing low-income families from getting ahead in life: The lack of funds to send their kids to kindergarten, which means that some children from low-income families start primary school lagging behind their peers. The lack of opportunity for their children to join enrichment/tuition programmes while other pupils are going for class after class. The fact that it’s becoming the norm that children need extra classes on top of regular school do well, something that children from low-income families may not be able to afford.

Of course, ST is just a newspaper, and has no control over the policies that have combined to make things so difficult for the low-income in Singapore. But there are other ways of helping that may be much more useful than a one-year subscription, which brings me to…

5. If ST really wants to help improve the access of low-income families to more information and knowledge, surely there are many other ways to achieve this? Perhaps funding could go towards free study centres for children of low-income families, where they could get help with their homework and studies. If Mr Fernandez really believes that ST’s so helpful, maybe he could leave a few copies of ST at those centres every day for the kids to share.

Or perhaps the money could go towards providing netbooks and/or Internet access to these families? Access to the Internet – allowing them to read not only reports from ST but from a whole myriad of other sources – is infinitely more helpful to low-income families and their children. Parents could use the Internet to job search (instead of just being restricted to what’s on Classifieds) and learn new skills while children could research for school projects. Is good, no?

Today ST reported that Singapore Press Holdings and its charity arm has just given $400k to the Community Chest to help 20 charities and organisations. They should stick to this rather than auctioning cars in the name of “charity” when they’re really just hawking subscriptions.

[bbwannabe]

Wah Piang.

Marketing scam don't use to pretend to use social clauses lah.

Horrible fake CSR.

Do something these people really need lah.

[HYM]

https://www.give.sg/TeamGIVE/terenceleejx/pissed-with-straits-times-charity-drive-donate-to-singapore-childrens-society-instead

[leftfield]

Just when you think it can't get any worse than HYM asking for donations for his BBK upgrade...

[Odessus]

HOD cannot afford his own BBK upgrade meh... Don't small see him hor... If he wants to raise donations for his BBK he just has to convince everyone to donate 1cent for each post he makes can liao.

[HYM]

Today like everyone also Suan me leh. Mod/ admin, I want to 'port all of them!!

[leftfield]

Today like everyone also Suan me leh. Mod/ admin, I want to 'port all of them!!

If one u can report, if many many, u need to self reflect.

[Barney]

If one u can report, if many many, u need to self reflect.

HOD cannot afford his own BBK upgrade meh... Don't small see him hor... If he wants to raise donations for his BBK he just has to convince everyone to donate 1cent for each post he makes can liao.

If one u can report, if many many, u need to self reflect.

I ran out of likes for today....lol