We want to start this letter by saying it’s a privilege to do what we do. Even on days when the news is slow or the work has piled up, there’s not a moment that passes where we’d rather turn our backs on the journalistic pursuit.
So it's with a heavy heart today that we must announce the suspension of publishing at Southeast Asia Globe, effective at the end of September. This is not a decision made lightly, nor as a reflection of the work of our staff, but rather the painful outcome of intensifying financial challenges unfortunately common to our industry.
We’ll touch on some of those in this letter. But first, we want to say these past 16 years have been a fantastic run.
We embarked on this journey in 2007 with the idea of bringing an international style publication to Cambodia, and we achieved our aim. From high quality stories and reporting on Southeast Asia and Cambodia showcasing world class photography and design, we made a commitment to turn out a premium, 100-page magazine every month. We maintained that commitment for 12 years without interruption, expanding to new markets and distributing the magazine in eight countries throughout the region by 2014.
With the rise of digital publishing and social media paired against the mounting costs of print and distributing magazines, we closed out the print version of Globe with our December 2018 edition. We then turned our attention to building the Globe you know today as a digital platform. From the start, we had embarked with a mission of sharing stories from around the region that promote a more informed, inclusive and sustainable future to a readership that cherishes well-written and designed articles. Looking back, we believe we’ve stayed true to those principles while honouring the standards we set at our founding.
Since moving the publication online, we’ve seen tremendous growth of our audience. Readers come to our website every month from more than 100 countries – something that would have been impossible to achieve in print. The shift to a digital-only publication model also coincided with the launch of our membership programme and other services to boost revenue and fill the holes left by the loss of print-based advertising revenues.
The building out of the subscription model and some of these other paid services, also coincided with
