Splice Newsroom’s office is wherever Alan Soon and Rishad Patel park their laptops. Today it’s a Starbucks in downtown Singapore, with glacially slow service and a soundtrack of ubiquitous cafe jazz. Their arrangement — lean, physically rootless, fluid — is the quintessential twenty-first-century media startup: the kind of business that they now spend their time studying.

Soon, forty-four, a journalist and Patel, forty-eight, a design specialist, founded Splice in 2017 to chart and shape the transformation of Asia’s media industry, starting with a website and newsletters and culminating in an ambitious, US$1m project to launch 100 startups.

In North America and Europe the press is highly introspective, with a symbiotic ecosystem of academic institutions, think tanks and consultancies that feed into an industry with an acknowledged social role; albeit one that is mostly privately owned and functions — or fails — on its ability to turn readers into money. In Asia, where the press is generally less lauded and where the media industry is far more heterogenous, there are few such organisations.

Splice aims to fill that gap, and to ask important questions about the future of the industry at a moment of profound change, Patel says. “What’s going on with the legacy media businesses? Why is there doomsday, but no business plan? Why doesn’t the startup energy [across the region] infuse itself into what’s going on with media?”

• Tags: Alan Soon, Issue 13, Peter Guest, Rishad Patel, Singapore, Splice