As we already enter a new arena of year—2022—independent media and quality journalism have never been so critical as before. The last two years of pandemic struggles, loaded with misinformation and disruptive narratives, have made that abundantly clear. Even the world of business, where The MMS lives, has the same pressing need.
Broadly, this year has been the year of un-bundled media with newsletter startup narrative articles landing big fish writers who went independent or freelancer like us. The year saw a robust conversation in which outsiders touted the value of investor newsletters, including Not Boring— our newsletter articles with around 11,000 readers in which an investor writes about his portfolio companies and the sponsors who pay him.
Closer to home, we’ve seen an increase in click topics and headlines; all the while, paid-for media has continued to rise with poor disclosures, at times, making it barely distinguishable from original reporting.
That’s where we see our work at The MMS playing an important role—readers need independent freelance sources. There’s no financial conflict, and we dig into topics that we want to investigate by speaking to sources from all angles. That’s increasingly important as waves of tech companies go public the world over, cryptocurrencies become prevalent and remain subject to speculation, and tech generally becomes omnipresent in our daily lives.
As a reader, you will have noticed a shift this year. We introduced our first podcast—Unofficial Sources—and launched a raft of newsletters on topics as diverse as e-commerce, green industries, cryptocurrencies, and sport.
Today, the definition of professional media has expanded. No longer is it consuming a newspaper or news website. Podcasts and newsletters are just the starting point for what news organisations offer.
For instance, we launched an Instagram account to showcase the richly detailed infographics crafted by our design team. We also have many more plans to widen the canvas of our work. We hope that in 2022 you, our reader, will enjoy our journalism across the medium(s) that make sense for you.
In the spirit of this shift, we had a unique set of stories this week: each was a podcast-style chat on key topics from the business worlds of India and Southeast Asia in 2022. The stories were all free-to-read, as is tradition for our end-of-year recaps. We have more lined up in the coming months— I can’t say more, but stay tuned! Meanwhile, we’ll be back with our regular pipeline of deeply reported, long-form stories tomorrow.
On behalf of the team, I wish you a very happy, prosperous and healthy New Year 2022