Little is known and written about newspaper literacy in the classroom. Yet reading the Straits Times constitutes an important part of the “English” curriculum for pre-university students in Singapore. The study reported in this article is part of a larger classroom intervention project, which aims to investigate how first-year, pre-university students in a junior college in Singapore read the newspaper. From the analysis of an online survey and classroom talk, this paper teases out the pedagogical implications for a critical literacy education that aims to encourage students to be critical readers of newspapers.