#22: A (late) mid-year reflection & update
Reflections & updates from the (other) editor of SEAmplified
Hello there,
It’s July, and we’ve crossed the mid-year mark at SEAmplified!
So I thought that instead of our usual content, it’d be good to share with you some of our reflections on running SEAmplified thus far and update you on what you can expect in the upcoming weeks and months.
And hopefully, you’d get to know us a little better from this “letter” :)
A look back to our initial months
First, a big thank you for welcoming us into your email inboxes since January this year (or when you hit the subscribe button)!
When we first started, we wanted to make Southeast Asia’s (SEA) politics accessible to youths in Singapore, because that’s partly what my co-founder Tian Wen and I are interested in.
We believe that youths need to get to know our region better so that they can better capitalize on the emerging opportunities in the region, and build friendships and trust across borders. We thought that it was a good idea to look at how the region’s politics could affect employment prospects because that was what many of our friends were interested in.
So for two months, we were running a weekly explainer series that covered how geopolitics and policies could affect your prospects in a certain industry, or how statistics reflect a certain trend in employment.
As part of the explainers, we also curated news roundups and community features to help you stay updated on the latest in politics and research in SEA. We also spoke to academics, where we simplified their research and opinions in a way that could be easily understood by you.
In March, we did our first round of reader interviews to find out how we were doing. We learned that the explainers series was too broad and random, and we were not attracting younger readers either.
We also realized that there were a lot of things that we didn’t know when it came to creating content that resonates with youths, and we felt kinda lost.
Charting a different path
In that same month,
, co-founder of RICE Media and coach agreed to be our mentor.I got to know Julian when we connected on LinkedIn in January, and we’re grateful to him for agreeing to guide us as we seek to build a media outlet that amplifies the voices of youths in SEA, with content that truly resonates with what youths are thinking about.
I’ve personally learned how to create better content from Julian, as he brings with him a set of perspectives gained from his experience building RICE, which has greatly helped us in clarifying our direction for SEAmplified.
Within the team, we also had a brainstorming session, and we decided to do away with the explainers and adopt a more humanistic approach to our reporting and storytelling.
We started with two series:
Finding Joy: Our take on how youths in SEA are trying to define and pursue happiness, and how society can empower them to do so
Trailblazers: We interview startup founders, social leaders, or cultural mavericks who are making SEA a better place
In particular, we’ve gained some traction from our “Trailblazers” series, and we learned that people resonated with the personal stories of our profiles! We intend to continue featuring awesome youths in SEA who are making an impact by shedding light on how their personal journey shaped them into who they are today. We hope that they serve as an inspiration for youths who may not be sure of their future.
On this note, you might remember that SEAmplified started as a four-man team if you’ve been following us since the start.
In April, Tian Wen and I decided to let our two team members (Qing Lin and Kelvin) go. We realized that we were not ready to provide them with the best learning and working experience since we were still trying to figure things out in this early stage of growth and exploration.
It was a learning moment for both of us, and a necessary decision to be taken so that we can accelerate our efforts to find our content fit.
That said, we’re thankful to them for helping us with the ideation and explainers in our initial months!
Soon after, we began to double down on our content experiment by coming up with two new series that are closely related to what youths are thinking about:
Redefining Work: We examine how SEA youths are rethinking their careers and what it means to be a successful professional
Sea Change: We look at the challenges wrought by climate change in Southeast Asia, and how youths are navigating them.
New directions ahead
In June, we did our second round of surveys and interviews with readers to find out how we’ve been doing with the humanistic approach.
(PS: A big thank you to the 15 readers who filled up our survey or spoke to me via our 1-to-1 chats!)
I’m glad to see that more than half of the respondents found our content valuable and relatable, which suggests that we’re on the right track. More than 70% and 60% of respondents also enjoyed our “Trailblazers” and “Redefining Work” series.
At the same time, I learned that there’s a need for us to make our content more engaging by utilizing the power of social media.
About half of you have asked for more short-form videos to be produced, and some of you also suggested that we should set up an account on TikTok. However, as SEAmplified is now a two-man effort, we’ve decided to focus on maintaining our existing channels through this newsletter, Instagram (IG), and LinkedIn for now.
I’ve also met with many media professionals through in-person chats and networking events, and they’ve helped us brainstorm new content ideas for SEAmplified.
In particular, I was stoked to meet He Ruiming, co-founder of
, who shared with me his take on content creation and his journey of running the popular personal finance webcomic with his co-founder and team.
With that, we’ve decided to make some changes to our content creation plan. We want to create more engaging and relatable content to attract more youths to learn about Southeast Asia while creating quality content to help professionals understand the trends that define these youths at the same time!
As such, I’d like to share that for this month (and perhaps subsequently), this is what our plan will look like:
We’ll be creating more social media exclusive content, to help you learn more about Southeast Asia and the trends that define youths in the region.
We’ve just started a new IG-exclusive content called “SEA Oddities”. Get your curiosity fed on all things trivial in Southeast Asia every week! (Check out the video below for details)
More IG-exclusive short-form videos are in the works, which include fire questions as part of our “Trailblazers” series, and an upcoming content partnership. Do follow our IG @seamplified.news for the latest updates!
We’re still brewing something for LinkedIn, and it will be announced on our LinkedIn account once it is ready! Follow us on LinkedIn here.
We’ll continue to publish long-form articles through this newsletter but at a reduced frequency.
This means that while we will continue to publish on Tuesdays at 9 am (GMT +8), we’ll publish every two weeks instead of the current weekly format.
We don’t want to compromise quality for the sake of meeting deadlines, and we feel that a reduced frequency will help us create better articles for you!
That’s all for this week’s update, and thank you for sticking by us.
If you have any feedback on our content or suggestions on how we can make SEAmplified better for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via tianwen.tay@seakoel.com or tanzhantiam@gmail.com!