I received a call from mypaper asking if they could use one of the opinion piece in the Chronicle for their columns tomorrow.

When I told her that I would need to check with my school for permission, her instant reaction was: “Oh so you all are not independent?”

Of course, at issue here is not even a question of journalistic independence, but a question of copyright ownership. I’m an editor, not a publisher, and am in no position to give away the property of the newspaper.

The knee-jerk response was all the more surprising coming from a paper by the Singapore Press Holdings—the same company that prints the Straits Times.

I’m not trying to put the SPH’s papers down or anything. Quite the contrary, working in a mini-newsroom has given me a good sense of the kind of work involved in practicing journalism in Singapore. Journalists working at Singapore papers have quite a bit of constraints to deal with daily, and I respect them for trying despite all that.

But what troubled me was for someone working at the SPH—which could well be under the influence of the government through the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act—to jump to such a conclusion.