
Resources
Splice Beta resources
Session summaries to read, watch, link to, and download
Takeaways
Kirsten Han
Kirsten Han, a Singapore-based freelancer, started We, the Citizens, a weekly newsletter that curates and analyzes news on human rights, politics, and social justice issues in Singapore, in April 2018. “My mother just tells people I read the news so they don’t have to,” she summarized.
It started out as free, but Han launched a paid subscription in June 2019 for $50 a year/$5 a month. “I wanted to frame it more as a tip,” she said. Because she’s not measuring herself with clicks or the whims of an editor, she’s able to think about what’s truly useful.
Here’s her pandemic journey:
Jeanette Goon
Jeanette Goon, a freelancer in Malaysia, has had wide ranging jobs, from an e-commerce entrepreneur to most recently as a bartender. She’s been trying to break into food and beverage journalism, but then Covid-19 happened. Many of her clients experienced weeks of no sales and her monthly income has dropped by about 60%. She’s taken this as an opportunity to do more of what she’s always wanted.
Norman Chella
Norman Chella runs five podcasts: two interview-style, two narrative style, and one daily. The flagship is Podlovers Asia, covering the Asian podcasting industry. On the side, as a consultant, he helps new podcasters launch in Asia.
Chella has three goals: to connect the fragmented Asian podcasting industry, to set an example to have podcasting as a career within Asia, and to make some noise through podcasting. “If you want to cross the sea together, build the boat,” he said. “Everyone who is involved, no matter how big or how small your show… we can all help each other out and cross the sea together.”
What he’s seen during the pandemic:
Erin Cook
Erin Cook started Dari Mulut ke Mulut, a digest for Southeast Asian news, four years ago. Premium subscribers get access to long-form analysis, while a free newsletter aggregates news. Covid-19 has been the biggest story she’s ever covered. “It’s so all-encompassing, it’s hard to identify what should be covered at any given point,” she said.
She’s attempting to make her newsletter pandemic-proof by showing paying subscribers why Southeast Asia is important to pay attention to, especially because it’s been undervalued by Western media.
How her plans have changed during the pandemic:
Our mission is to drive radical change by supporting bold, forward-looking media startups in Asia. In order to do this, we report on, teach, transform, and fund newsrooms in Asia.
Our newsletters are read by some of the smartest people in global media.
We’re Alan Soon and Rishad Patel, and there’s more about us here.
All the knowledge from Splice Beta is right here. Learn from this community’s best.
The Splice Beta Fund is a prototyping grant that helps news and media entrepreneurs in Asia to quickly ideate, launch, test, and iterate products and services for audiences and customers. See our six grantees here!
Splice Lights On is our way of supporting the media community financially affected by Covid-19. See the grantees here.
Splice Low-Res is our virtual community check-in for media startups. Register, watch, sponsor, or stay in the loop here.
Splice is available for speaking engagements, to run workshops, product sponsorships, research, design audits, and consulting. Email us.
We also have a Telegram group. Come say hi.