Eh who is Martino Tan?

WHO IS HE?

Mr Martino Tan is the Deputy Managing Director and Managing Editor at Mothership.sg, an online news platform. He previously worked in the Prime Minister’s Office, and also served as Head, New Media, Media Relations at the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts.

In 2012, Mr Martino Tan was comfortably settled in his job as Senior Manager of online communications at the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), managing Facebook posts for Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, when finance executive Mr Lien We King came knocking on his door, proposing a digital-only platform for young Singaporeans. Mr Lien had met with another young man before that: Mr Belmont Lay, the founder of satirical site New Nation. “Bear in mind that it was a year after the watershed 2011 general election,” he explained. “I felt that Singaporeans were still trying to make sense of it all, the political and social awakening.”

Despite their differences, the men shared this same view, as well as the idea of creating a site, “in the style of Buzzfeed in the US, inspired by the ideals of openness, inclusiveness and creativity.” “As writers just starting out, Belmont and I simply hoped to inform, educate and entertain our audience by presenting a new way of looking at Singapore-related news and stories,” Mr Tan elaborates. “On some level, we hoped to make Singapore ‘more exciting’, to entice Singaporeans to read and better understand more about this place we call home,” he explains. They embarked on “a long-running experiment” on the content of the site, shaped by the feedback they received from their then-small audience.

By June 2013, Mr Tan had resigned from the PMO and embarked on Mothership.sg (as the site came to be known) full time, building the website, speaking to freelancers, then sharing content on Facebook and Twitter. “We observed what worked and what didn’t,” he says. This beta phase was not easy, but Mr Tan remained hopeful. “We had a shoestring budget. The website crashed a couple of times, but we each had some experience in creating and managing online content — more importantly, with national-level types of interactions and virality — so we were unfazed by the volume and intensity of the reactions to our content,” he explains. “All that said,” he admits, “this was still a hefty risk. Although I was optimistic, I sought permission from my wife Denise to leave the civil service. We had gotten married the same year that I embarked on this adventure. I told her that I would give it my best shot for two to three years. It was a big move for the both of us.”

https://www.nus.edu.sg/alumnet/thealumnus/issue-120/people/pursuit-of-excellence/charting-his-own-course

Fucktardo would be a better name for this motherfucking ciuccio.