Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Singapore's Most Influential News Story of 2009 - Poll Results

I ran this little poll here on Insights-Asia, just to get a sense of which of these news stories created the largest impact on readers in Singapore. In fact, when I was compiling the big news stories of 2009, the list was endless as there were many more that created waves. However, I wanted a good balance between economic, social and political stories and hence, my list.

There is little surprise that voters chose the Resilience Package, Economic Recession and Its Woes as the most influential news story of 2009, given that it was topic that was on most Singaporeans' minds. What is perhaps more surprising though is its margin of victory as the second placed news story lost by only 1 vote (2%)! It is the Integration of Foreign Expats which came close to topping it and few can deny that this was one of the most discussed issues in Singapore last year and is still being carried forward until now.

The ranking of the other stories, APEC Singapore, Multiracialism in Singapore and the Singapore Youth Olympic Games, did not score as highly as the other two and I guess this may give a slight indication of what influences Singaporeans most. Having said that, the sample size was a challenge and I hope to get more respondents in the future so that the voting results can be more reflective of the general population.