Taking a hiatus on Weekly news roundup but not lying flat 😜 | Following the yuan

Will you chat with me for ~15 min about how I can improve this newsletter for you or answer a few Qs via email?

Ciao! Apologies for missing a couple issues on weekly news roundup if you’ve been waiting, refreshing your pages over and over and wondering whether your service provider is broken — it’s not. It’s me. 😭

I recently received a scholarship for CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program (thanks Meta!), which runs from March to June for 100 days. I’m spending 5+ hours each week on classes at night on top of the writing and consultancy work I do after leaving my full-time journalism job last Nov.

That’s a long-winded explanation to why I plan to take a pause on spending around 8 hours on news roundup every week with the help of

Richard Whiddington

. But after a few super valuable speaker sessions at EJCP (with the likes of

Anita Zielina from ReThink.

), I realize that to make this sustainable, I need to refocus and rethink about this newsletter’s positioning and revenue models.

In the coming weeks, I plan to do more commentaries and collaborations, but will take a pause on weekly news roundup until July.

As someone with a media studies and translator background before pivoting to journalism, the reason behind my change of heart was because I wanted to tell China stories in a way that’d make the rest of the world see China not as the ‘others’ but as part of the global community.

That initial motivation evolved while in the newsroom and for the newsletter, now it also gave me great satisfaction to know that I’m covering underreported angles and filling the small gaps as large newsrooms chase after big political and business moves.

Last week, I had the honor to speak on the panel of Columbia China Forum with staff reporters and writers from the likes of Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and New Yorker on China reporting, while secretly fangirling over Peter Hessler (it’s ok, he won’t see this).

It consolidated my understanding and belief that people’s stories matter. And I hope to refresh my product this summer with more original content and multi-tiered offerings after wrapping up with EJCP.

I hope we’re only getting started.

P.S. I’m currently developing a user research as part of the program, and it’d be really helpful if you could answer a few questions regarding your media consumption habits and how do you want to consume China business news via Zoom. You could also answer them by answering the following Qs in an email.

1. Can you introduce yourself briefly?

2. What are your go-to info sources for the news you want to get? (newsletters, podcasts, sites, apps, etc.)

3. When’s the last time you read business news about China and found it useful? What was it?

4. Do you have a preferred time to check out newsletters or do you think time doesn't matter to you personally?

5. What are the criteria when you pay for a content service? What other services do you think I could/should provide that you’d pay?

Alternatively, you can book a 15-30 min chat with me on Calendly! Hope to chat soon. 🔚