The Middle Ground bites the dust amidst stiff competition for eyeballs in local media arena

News website The Middle Ground announced yesterday that it will be closing shop in the coming months. The site’s publisher wrote yesterday:

The Middle Ground was founded by communications specialist Daniel Yap and veteran journalist Bertha Henson in June 2015. Describing itself as a “space for everyone in the middle, somewhere in between the madness at both extremes,” the site aimed to be “a place where two sides can meet and be informed about opposing schools of thought. It is a place for moderate speech and agreeable disagreement.”

The website is not the only online news publication that is winding down operations in recent months. In a time where mainstream publications close shop or begin mass retrenchment, the number socio-political and news websites are also dwindling.

In the last two years alone, websites like Inconvenient Questions and Six-Six News have ceased operations.

Both sites, which offered socio-political content, were reportedly shut down due to a lack of funds to sustain operations.

The rankings for online news publications have also been plummeting.

Here are the Alexa rankings of some news websites that cover socio-political news in Singapore:

In spite of the increasingly harsh local media landscape, The Independent is immensely thankful to our readers for keeping our news website going. Rankings show that The Independent has been consistently moving up and we are grateful to our readers who help us soar to greater heights.