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Quoting anonymous inside sources, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 12 that Singapore Press Holdings is planning on retrenching up to 10 percent of its workforce and merging The New Paper and MyPaper to become a free tabloid sheet to compete with Mediacorp's Today.

The move comes in the midst of a sluggish economy, dwindling profits and a burgeoning online content space that is eating into legacy media's market share.

Information on this matter is still not officially public yet, but anonymous sources have since gone tattling to Bloomberg and Yahoo Singapore, spilling the beans on how the mood is sombre internally as employees await announcement from the company that can come as early as Thursday.

SPH responded to repeated calls for comment by saying they do not respond to speculation. (Bloomberg, Yahoo and Mumbrella requested for comment.)

According to Yahoo Singapore, SPH's financial report for the fiscal third quarter, as of end-May 2016, showed it had 4,229 employees and its staff costs amounted to some S$277 million.

The retrenchment of staff would hit part-timers hardest.

Manpower at TNP, for example, is expected to halve from 90 to 50, in a move SPH is most likely going to call a "restructuring" and "reorganisation".

TNP is three decades old, while MyPaper, a bilingual paper, was first published in June 2006 and could have been a cornerstone of the late Lee Kuan Yew's vision of a bilingual Singapore.

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