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SINGAPORE — On Monday (Jan 9), several senior employees of SPH Media were taken to task or left the company after an internal review found issues linked to circulation numbers.

According to an SPH Media spokesman, lapsed contracts continued to be counted in circulation data. Some copies were printed, counted for circulation and then destroyed; double-counting of subscriptions across multiple instances.

“A project account was injected with additional funding over a period of time to purchase fictitious circulation,” the spokesman said. “Certain circulation numbers were arbitrarily derived,” she added.

These resulted in a discrepancy of between 85,000 and 95,000 daily average copies across all titles, which represents 10 to 12 per cent of the reported daily average circulation, the spokesman added.

According to a former Straits Times editor, this has apparently been going on for over thirty years, where papers would be counted into circulation but destroyed even by “dumping in the river”.

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Media veteran P.N Balji said: “This massaging of circulation figures has been whispered about for years. That was when SPH was a public listed company. Times have changed. Today it is a company that relies on public funding and with a former senior minister like Khaw Boon Wan in charge, public accounting has become important”.

We then asked: “At the heart of the issue is the integrity of SMT. How who would the “official” or national media now regard its role if it cannot be trusted?”

To this, Mr Balji added: “Trust and integrity are built up over a long period of time. As long as govt controls media, trust and integrity will always be an issue”.

Circulation is a count of how many copies of a particular publication are distributed. Readership is an estimate of how many readers a publication has. Readership figures are usually higher than circulation figures because of the assumption that a typical copy is read by more than one person.

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SPH

SPH’s website places its combined print and digital readership at 2,047,000. Its monthly unique visitors are 8,613,000, and it has 63,045,000 monthly page views.

In May 2021, the then-Minister for Communications and Information, S. Iswaran said that as of August 2020, the daily average circulation of ST on print and digital platforms was 458,200, up from 386,100 a year ago. Digital circulation for ST, which was close to 300,000, exceeded that of print. But despite rising readership, SPH’s media business has been steadily losing revenue, said the minister. Its media business has lost half its operating revenue in the past five years and posted its first-ever loss of $11.4 million in 2020.

Several senior employees of SPH Media have been taken to task or left the company after an internal review found issues linked to circulation numbers.

“The staff involved had been taken to task, or had left the organisation.” The staff members were not named.

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The spokesman said the company had, in March 2022, initiated a review of internal processes. This included the reporting of circulation data.

TISG has reached out to SPH Media for comment and clarification. /TISG