Singapore’s satirical news site loves trolling legit media, gets 1 million page-views every month

February 26, 2014 Leave a comment

Singapore’s satirical news site loves trolling legit media, gets 1 million page-views every month

February 19, 2014

by Enricko Lukman

Singapore’s satirical news site New Nation has gained a bit of a reputation inside Indonesia’s media circles since one of its articles became a major headline and topic of discussion among Indonesians last week. The news was about Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, who unfriended Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Facebook. In case you’re wondering, yes, it was all made up.

Major Indonesian media outlets like Kompas, TribunNews, and MetroTVNews published the news as the truth. They were then slammed by Singapore’s Straits Times for being duped. New Nation co-founder Belmont Lay explains this is not the first time it’s happened. He describes a few other instances whereMalaysian and Singaporean news media also got duped.

Like with US-based The Onion (which has also been quoted as gospel truth by hapless media), the best way to tell whether or not a news item is fake is by looking carefully at the quoted sources. Lay explains they use fictitious names inside New Nation. He adds:

[The names] are usually Chinese words that have been Romanised to look like real names but are so obviously fake if you know Mandarin.

For example, the hoax name Wo Ming Bai actually means “I understand” in Chinese. And Mei Zhang Fu literally translates to “No husband”.

I don’t understand how seasoned reporters who know the Chinese language can see these names and not be suspicious at all.

A look at New Nation’s tagline, “50 percent real news,” should help, too.

Trolling people since 2010

New Nation was started in December 2010 by three Singaporeans – Belmont Lay, Terence Lee 1, and Shihan Fang. Lay says, “We took a look at the internet scene in Singapore and couldn’t stand how everyone was writing and producing annoyingly pompous pseudo-intellectual claptrap while getting credit for it. So we decided to join them to write things that are devoid of real meaning. We wanted to be The Economist of Singapore, but without all the graphs and long articles and stuff.”

As a satire news site, New Nation doesn’t have an office and the writers put in their pieces periodically according to their mood. “Nobody works for New Nation. It is entirely powered by magic and hubris,” says Lay. The three co-founders have their own full time jobs as journalists and bloggers.

Despite it not being taken very seriously by the founders, New Nation is running quite well. The site records about one million page-views a month. New Nation has ads, but Lay explains that they mainly serve as a running joke, too. “[The ads] are there so that people unfamiliar with the New Nation brand would actually believe that our site produces real, legit news.”

“The big dream of New Nation’s’ founders is to beat everyone at their own game while not taking ourselves seriously. If we do write the truth, it is purely coincidental,” explains Lay.

So this is a warning to everyone who reads New Nation not to take things too seriously.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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