S3: Ep 2 | Building Trust In Government Communications

Season 3 continues on the theme of ownership, and this time the thing being owned is a whole city’s worth of communication. 

Martine Maingot leads centralised communications for the Equity and Inclusion Cabinet at the City of Boston, covering eight departments and six initiatives under Mayor Michelle Wu. When David Bowman and Jarbas Horst ask what she owns, she doesn’t reach for a channel or a budget line. She says the connective tissue between the departments. 

Martine started out in banking and moved into city government, and the contrast shapes how she works. Banks answer to shareholders and regulators. The city answers to the residents who live there. So when a message needs softening, the question she asks is who it protects and who it costs; and if a safer version protects the institution while costing the community clarity or dignity, that’s where she pushes back. 

The conversation covers the discipline behind one message and seven touches, why she wants people repeating things in their own words rather than reciting hers, how she makes messages easy to remember rather than merely accurate, and why she multiplies every piece of feedback she receives by twenty-five. On AI, she’s firmly in the practitioner camp, a tool to be respected, but one that can’t tell you whether something is trustworthy. That, she says, is a human call every time.