By Alicia Wong |
SingaporeScene – 2 hours 25 minutes ago
Controversial socio-political website The Temasek
Review (TR) will be shutting down sometime after July this
year following several years of operation.
In an exclusive email interview with Yahoo! Singapore,
editor Amanda Tan said that the editorial team of seven made the
decision partly because of uncertainty over funding for the site,
which is not for profit and runs on donations.
"TR's popularity has exceeded all our expectations, and with
increased readership demands for hardware rises (sic), and it would
reach a level which the TR team can no longer comfortably afford,"
she said.
TR now has 5,000 unique visitors per day with 100,000 page
views.
"TR was never meant to 'live' forever. It was set up to help
cultivate political awareness among fellow Singaporeans and we felt
that we have achieved that," said Tan.
"We have started the ball rolling and it is time we work on
getting back our lives and spending more time with our family," she
said.
Since it started, the site has made waves online with its famous
-- or infamous -- reports critical of Singapore's ruling People's
Action Party.
Last year, Singapore's state investment company, Temasek Holdings, asked the website to change its name,
claiming TR was trying to capitalise on the goodwill and reputation
linked to the name "Temasek Review".
Tan stressed that there was no "external influence" pressuring
them to close the site, which has garnered a reputation for being
stridently anti-government.
Claiming TR is "not against any institution or anyone in
particular", she said, "We really do not believe that the
government is all out to shut us down because with their vast
resources, they would already have done so if they had wanted
to."
Noting that the closure — which will take place after they
resolve all matters to do with TR Debit Card orders — is "a
question of when, not if", Tan said, "The sale of our domain and
donations did in a way help keep the site alive, but what about
next year, the year after and so forth?"
Tan added, "It is indeed a difficult decision for our team of
seven, but we realised that inevitably it is a path we have to
take, and (we have to) learn to move on."
Recently, the team has been dropping hints of an impending
closure. In a post this month, Tan urged those involved with TR to
buy its debit card and "own a 'piece' of history when TR is no
more".
Did last year's reports that general practitioner Joseph Ong was
TR's founder influence the team's decision? No, said Tan. "When we
took over, it was a fresh team."
Ong told the media he was involved with the site from 2007 but
had stopped in 2009.
While Tan said there is a possibility for the site to be handed
over to a "new dedicated team", it would be "difficult to find a
team we can trust".
In October 2010, the TR domain was sold to a business woman. If
a new team is not found, the buyer would likely sell the domain
name, said Tan.
Will the team finally reveal itself?
"We will be meeting up for Christmas and
surely pictures will be taken. If anyone of us gets too drunk, we
might "accidentally" email some to The Online Citizen," Tan
quipped.
While it is still early days, it is unlikely the team will get
together again to start another TR-type project, said Tan.
She said, the team hopes for other online sites to "carry on
such spirit of citizen journalism" in
Singapore.
"Such citizen journalism augments Singapore's mainstream media
to provide an overall balanced coverage to Singaporeans. In this
way, the society moves forward as a whole."
A loss for the blogosphere?
Professor Ang Peng Hwa, acting head for the division of
journalism and publishing in Nanyang Technological University, said this is
"definitely a loss for the blogsphere and also for critical
discourse in Singapore".
"I personally don't agree with many of the comments made in TR,
but I think it's an outlet for ideas worth talking about," he said,
wondering also if the team has lost its "passion".
Founder and editor of commentary website New Asia Republic
Donaldson Tan said the website will be "greatly missed".
Its anonymity allows the site to play an important role in
covering controversial news stories but also constraints its
ability to raise money from the public, he noted.
"It would easily cost at least $500/month to run a web server with very high bandwidth and DDOS protection," said Tan, who suggested TR consider
downgrading its internet infrastructure after the General Election
rather than shutting down.
Tan said that there may be bloggers aspiring to "fill the big
shoes" of TR but they would lack the site's organisation. "It take
years to fine-tune the operation run by voluntary bloggers, to
build a reputation and to achieve the level of online popularity
Temasek Review has achieved."
He urged for TR to continue operations at least until GE 2011-12
is over.
-Yahoo! News Sg
