It has been announced that Singapore Press Holdings will be culling 10 percent of its workforce over the next two years and merging The New Paper and My Paper to form a revamped tabloid sheet to compete with Mediacorp’s Today.

With everyone focused on the doom and gloom of the impending retrenchment and the unsavoury signals this sends to the rest of the media industry, the fact of the matter is that, when it is all said and done, SPH still owns a 40 percent stake in the publisher that publishes Today and has a vested interest in knowing that Today cannot afford to die an ugly death in the dog fight to the bottom.

Via a 2004 SPH media release:

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MediaCorp will retain a 60 per cent stake in MediaCorp Press Pte Ltd, which will continue to publish TODAY. It will sell the remaining 40 per cent share to SPH at a consideration of S$19.16 million.

This deal was struck when SPH merged its free newspaper, Streats with Today then.

So, why this new merger between The New Paper and My Paper to cannibalise on the free newspaper market dominated by Today, which SPH already has a stake in?

Maybe because putting something into another thing is, uuh, fun?

Regardless, the creator of the above cartoon is Guay Chong Kian, 45, a creative partner in an advertising agency.

Guay has been posting his tongue-in-cheek cartoons on Facebook on a page called SemiSerious. The name pays homage to cartoonists at The New Yorker magazine and is reminiscent of the minimalist single-panel style of the publication's cartoons.

Guay has done more than two dozen cartoons since he started posting on Aug. 6.

Here are some of his other works:

Check out SemiSerious Facebook page for his other works.

Related article:

S’pore Press Holdings confirms retrenchment exercise, culling 10% of workforce

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