SPH Media, publisher of The Straits Times and over a dozen media brands in Singapore's four official languages, faced declining advertising revenue and the structural challenge of sustaining quality journalism in a small domestic market. The organisation needed to transition from print-centric workflows optimised for decades to real-time digital publishing cadences, while serving fragmented audiences across social platforms, messaging apps, and its own 100+ digital sites and applications reaching approximately 4 million unique monthly users.
Compliance requirements under Singapore's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) demanded rapid content-verification capabilities that legacy editorial workflows could not sustain at digital publication speeds. Routine tasks like transcription, translation across four languages, and article formatting consumed significant journalist time — resources better directed toward investigative reporting and analysis in an era when the government allocated S$260 million in FY2024 funding contingent on meeting digital reach, youth engagement, and vernacular audience KPIs.
SPH Media deployed generative AI, large language models, and automation across its newsroom workflow to streamline transcription, translation, summarisation, named entity identification, sentiment analysis, and PDF content extraction. These AI tools reduced time spent on routine multilingual content production across English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil editions, freeing journalists to focus on higher-value investigative and analytical work.
The organisation established a centralised DataHub aggregating website analytics, app usage, subscription data, and third-party information, accessible through the Lumos newsroom analytics dashboard. AI-powered content-recommendation engines and audience-analytics clustering algorithms informed editorial planning, while a cloud migration to AWS provided the scalable infrastructure needed for real-time AI and machine learning workloads.
SPH Media also introduced interactive digital features including in-article polls, an AI-powered story summariser, and data-driven personalised content delivery. A digital-subscription propensity model identified readers exhibiting conversion-ready behaviours, enabling precisely timed paywall encounters. The strategy embraced an "audience-first" approach using unified reader-identity layers to capture cross-edition engagement and optimise advertising audience segmentation.
This is an industry case study based on publicly available information. SPH Media is not a Pertama Partners client.
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