KINIBIZ The Star’ s marketing team has unknowingly been putting out full-page advertisements of the newspaper’s shrinking circulation numbers. Tiger pries into the inner workings of media auditing to hunt down dastardly acts of double counting.

It’s not every day that Tiger comes across a story such as this: Like a deranged captive tiger turning against its handler, a seemingly innocuous exercise in self-promotion has unexpectedly turned around to bite the hand that feeds it.

Call it an own goal, a self-inflicted wound or a plan that backfired, all are equally embarrassing.

With its latest move, The Star ’s advertising team has only confirmed what most have been suspecting for years, that The English daily’s print circulation has been falling. And the ad team could not have presented the information in a clearer, in-your-face fashion

The Star ’s print circulation - basically the number of copies of the newspaper sold in a given day (excluding Sundays) - has seen a decline in recent years for a number of reasons. The first is the cannibalisation of its print business by its online news portal, The Star Online.

It doesn’t help that when The Star readers switch from print to online, they are also moving from the profit-making side to the loss-making side of the newspaper’s publishing business.

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This article was written by Chan Quan Min.