There's no doubt the Internet poses a considerable challenge for Singapore's government and its control over the media. Singaporeans are turning in droves to the Internet for news, information and entertainment, and are finding that the chat rooms and forums provide a welcoming venue to debate topics such as government ministers' pay packages, language, gay rights and stories in the pro-government press.

So Singapore Press Holdings Ltd., the publisher of English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil newspapers, is launching the oddly named Project Eyeball in an effort to woo Singapore's younger, tech-savvy readers -- and at a time when SPH soon will lose its monopoly to another government-linked company that is starting a newspaper.

Enter Bertha Henson, a feisty 35-year-old Singaporean chosen to edit Project Eyeball. A veteran of the SPH group, she has worked at the Straits Times, SPH's flagship daily newspaper, and at the New Paper, the group's racier tabloid, so she knows what plays -- and what doesn't -- in this city-state of nearly four million people. She reckons that the government will allow Project Eyeball more freedom, largely because it will have a smaller readership consisting of well-educated, cosmopolitan readers. The paper expects a circulation of just 35,000, compared with around 400,000 for the Straits Times. SPH isn't revealing what it plans to spend on the launch.

The goal is to mark a clear departure from the papers that SPH already publishes, but not run afoul of the government strictures that govern all media in Singapore. Ms Henson's target readers are "tired of the Straits Times" and "tired of listening to the government," according to Project Eyeball's readership profile. The leather-jacket-wearing Ms Henson has jettisoned the standard SPH business card with its easily identifiable blue logo, and instead printed up a batch of bright orange cards. And in the run-up to Saturday's launch, when 120,000 copies of the paper will be given away, Ms Henson has been begging Singaporeans -- via the teaser online editions -- to tell her what they really want to read about.

A recent weekday evening finds Ms Henson on call, accompanied by a moderator with the name "The Eye Police," taking questions from curious readers. Will it tackle gay and lesbian issues? What sort of political coverage will it have? Will it carry reviews of the party and club scene in Singapore?

"(I) understand that we can write in with our comments, but I still get the feeling that it is going to be screened and censored, knowing Singapore. So it is not going to be totally honest," says a participant who emails in as "Gerl." Ms Henson replies: "I think I got to make clear that Eyeball can't simply print EVERYTHING. There are always kooks out there with weird ideas. And I am not about to let this be a platform for nutters."

Someone called "Surfer" asks: "How far will your paper go when it comes to asking government-sensitive questions?" She responds: "I think sometimes the government simply has to hear from the people about what they think on issues. It's silly to ignore views. It could lose them the GE (general election)."

After the cyber-exchange, Project Eyeball posts a story on its Web site declaring, "History was made . . . For the first time ever, a newspaper editor from the Singapore Press Holdings group of newspapers sat down and had a heart-to-heart talk with readers."

It's not just Ms Henson who is interested in what readers want and think. Explaining her mission to a group of Singapore's civil servants recently, she says her audience got all fired up at the idea of being able to use her newspaper as a tool to test Singaporeans' responses to policies and key issues. Ms Henson says she told the civil servants that she was always interested in hearing from them, but privately she says she won't let her paper be used that way.

The editor of Singapore Window, a Web site that pulls together articles about Singapore from outside the country, figures that the government wants to appear to be offering a more open and liberal media so that "Singaporeans can be lulled into just looking at what is available locally -- the print, electronic and cyber media; this way they will still be able to control the media and do their best to prevent the world media from influencing Singaporeans." The editor, who uses a pseudonym, made his comments in an e-mail.

Indeed, the government says the media's role is to relay its policies to the people and to help with nation-building. "Newspapers must operate within much narrower perimeters than their counterparts in most parts of the world," says Straits Times reporter Cherian George in a paper he delivered about the Singapore media. "It must accept its subordinate role in society. In practice this means the tone of stories must be respectful towards the country's leaders. They can be critical, but they cannot ridicule or lampoon, or erode public respect for elected positions."

Lim Boon Heng, minister without portfolio, recently said "there is an unfortunate trend in the competitive media to play up the bad cases" of social behavior, according to a story in the Straits Times. "If you want to do investigative reporting, there must be something that is wrong which has not been attended to. I think there are not many issues in Singapore that fall under that category."

To Ms Henson, criticisms of the Singapore media -- particularly those by foreign journalists -- aren't especially welcome. In her view there are certain things not worth stirring up. Singaporeans have a good life, a nice home and car, and what they care about is making money, she says. Most of them don't want to stand out from the crowd, and they don't want to shake things up, she believes.

Ms Henson was an arts graduate who stumbled into journalism. She graduated in 1986 during a recession and applied to work as a journalist at SPH because the pay seemed good. She quickly moved to the politics desk where she spent eight years, and she appears to enjoy the sense of being an insider that comes from rubbing shoulders with powerful politicians.

She comes across as a firm believer in the People's Action Party, which has ruled Singapore since independence in 1965. But she has also written pieces that don't reflect so well on the government, such as a report on a big decline in the PAP's youth wing as young people felt there were few opportunities for them to make their voices heard.

However, the story she is proudest of was an interview with Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew in which he talked about his elder son's cancer. (The son, Lee Hsien Loong, has since recovered. He is a deputy prime minister and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.)

In 1996 she was tapped to be acting deputy editor of the New Paper. The deputy editor was moved to another part of SPH after an embarrassing incident in which the paper reported that a cabinet minister had been involved in a hit-and-run accident. It was incorrect -- the real driver had the same name, so the New Paper had to withdraw its edition, and all the papers in the SPH stable published front-page apologies the next day.

She's been at SPH long enough to know what's taboo in the local media -- race, religion and language -- and she doesn't expect that to change at Project Eyeball. "If it's a story that pits one race against another, alarm bells start ringing. If one race starts to slag off another culture, or enforce a negative stereotype, highlighting (it) can be nasty," says Ms Henson, a Eurasian who's married to an Australian. So normally, the papers are extremely careful in their reporting of arguments between neighbors. "If neighbors quarrel, we (report) it very clinically and only because of court" reports, she says, although she concedes that readers can usually identify people by race from their names.

But she says she'll try to tackle other issues that tend to be neglected by the mainstream papers. Dummy issues of Project Eyeball focused on homosexuality after a gay-rights group was banned from meeting to discuss how gay Singaporeans could play a role in the development of Singapore. And the recent accidental death of a teenager who strangled himself while experimenting with auto-erotic techniques led Ms Henson to propose interviewing Singapore's teenagers about their Internet surfing habits. Despite blocks on certain porn sites, "it's out there and children know about it," she says, so it's time parents knew what their kids were looking at on the Internet, "though we wouldn't write about it in a preachy kind of way."