Audience loyalty today is “a repeated choice,” not a subscription, according to Alvin Chong, supervising editor of growth and innovation at Mediacorp, Singapore’s national media network whose flagship news brand is CNA.

During the recent INMA Asia-Pacific News Media Summit, Chong said the traffic era — the shift away from a single “big front door” for news discovery — continues to evolve, with audiences now encountering CNA through scattered platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and X, alongside AI tools that increasingly answer questions without sending users to a publisher’s Web site.

“There’s no longer one big front door for us for people to discover news anymore,” Chong said.

Bringing audiences home

Chong described Mediacorp’s strategy as twofold: Meeting audiences where they already are, and drawing them closer to owned products.

On the first front, he pointed to vertical video’s dominance across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even LinkedIn, alongside chat apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, which he said sit in a middle space by allowing near-daily notifications to audiences who haven’t muted the brand.

On the second front, he cited CNA’s app, Web site, archives, and interactive content as products designed to deepen engagement once audiences arrive.

“We kind of need to do both,” Chong said. “I think we can’t ignore one or the other.”

SnackBot: data-driven video coaching

Central to Mediacorp’s TikTok strategy is SnackBot, a custom GPT trained on 500 of the network’s best-performing TikTok videos by engagement and views. Chong said the tool emerged after younger journalists, drawn to creator-style vertical video, began flooding a small video team with pitch ideas.

SnackBot now helps journalists refine pitches before they reach human editors, sometimes telling them an idea won’t work and needs revision. The tool doesn’t dismiss ambitious ideas outright, Chong said, but asks whether a concept can be shaped to perform well on TikTok, while journalists retain the option to bring any idea to an editor regardless of the bot’s feedback.

“The editor still needs to be there,” Chong said, adding that by the time a pitch reaches an editor, it has already been through an initial vetting process.

The results, he said, were notable; Mediacorp averaged one video per day with more than a million views between the first and second half of 2025, alongside a more than 100% increase in TikTok views, without increasing overall video output.

“It’s not like you’re flooding the market,” Chong said. “But at the same time, we were getting more engaging videos.”

Turning archives into conversations

Mediacorp also used Google’s Gemini notebook tool to convert roughly 240 episodes of its long-running consumer investigative program, Talking Point, into an interactive format where users can ask questions and receive answers drawn from the show’s archive. The team cleaned automated YouTube transcriptions and adjusted for Singlish and Singaporean English colloquialisms, which Chong said reduced processing time per question from about five minutes to roughly 30 seconds.

The tool includes chapter markers and a curated list of puns used by host Steven Chia, initially aimed at engaging the show’s most dedicated fans, and was shared across WhatsApp and Telegram groups with what Chong described as positive early feedback.

Iterating chat-app bots with performance data

Mediacorp’s WhatsApp and Telegram bots began as simple summarisation tools before evolving to advise editors on which of two competing stories might perform better, based on data from past posts. The team is now testing a third version with updated data and tightened prompts.

Since adopting data-driven drafting in January 2026, Chong said WhatsApp engagement has shown a more consistent upward trend compared to previous fluctuations, though he cautioned that editorial judgment remains central to the process.

CNA app offers reach without a paywall

Chong highlighted two recent CNA app features: CNA Fast, a swipeable, AI-generated and human-edited summary product launched roughly two years ago, and CNA Games, launched more recently.

CNA Fast readers average 27% daily return rates, Chong said, with Fast views increasing 40% between the first half of 2025 and the same period this year — without cannibalising main site pageviews. CNA Games users spend about seven minutes per visit, and the feature has prompted lapsed users to re-register, despite CNA having no paywall.

“People are willing to sign up and pay [attention] and ... just to make sure that their streak is not broken,” Chong said.

Asked whether a CNA paywall is planned, Chong said no, citing the friction risk of shifting from a long-standing free, ad-supported model, though he said Mediacorp remains open to a sufficiently differentiated paid product in the future.

Reach, loyalty, and behaviour

Chong summarised his approach in three points:

1. Reach remains the starting point, since content must exist where audiences already spend time.
2. Loyalty is built through repeated choices, from following on TikTok to returning to CNA Fast.
3. Tools should be shaped by audience behaviour and data, not developed in isolation.

“Success is really not about finding a new metric to replace page views,” Chong said. “The important thing is, after every view, after every click ... did we give them a reason to choose us again?”

Asked for his biggest takeaway on loyalty, Chong said the media landscape “will always change,” urging newsrooms to remain nimble rather than clinging to familiar formats. On what habit he’d change across regional newsrooms, he pointed to encouraging younger journalists and newer platforms like TikTok, rather than sidelining their ideas.

Banner art: Adobe Stock by Sandwish.

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