A Personal Indulgence
A personal note here... for the last six weeks, I've been putting in 12-16 hours work days. There is no comparison with what our friends in Myanmar are going through now, but it's still quite a workload for one person to manage, and sometimes I find myself doing two tasks at once while talking to three people, all on separate platforms. And I know I haven't been perfect at it, so I thank you for indulging my imperfections, and I want to address some of those here.
First, I want to express gratitude. Ideally this is best done person to person, and I do hope to individually thank everyone one day, but it has simply been beyond my capacity to find the time to do so during these weeks. So, before I proceed in telling you how much your support has meant to me, I want to apologize for not doing it sooner, and not reaching out to you directly.
To start, I am grateful beyond words for those who have donated during this crisis. To put it plainly, your generosity has funded all the posting, podcasts, and writing that we’ve been producing this month. You have been able to sustain this current effort by supporting all the resources we need at this time. And through your consistent donations, we have not had to spend time looking for more funding opportunities, instead putting that valuable time to better use by creating yet more content. So these donations have allowed our team the luxury of looking exclusively at the stories we want to tell, and how to tell them.
Next, for anyone who has volunteered or contributed in any way, thanks! Whether you helped in big or small ways, you fulfilled a function or service that enhanced the work we were doing, or allowed our content to reach a wider audience.
The second thing I want to address is communication. Thank you to everyone who has interacted with me personally or with the platform in general, and I apologize for those conversations and comments that I was not able to respond to, or that took me much longer than usual to engage. Thanks to those who have sent content our way or helped to better contextualize the content we were working with. And please forgive any delays or imperfections with the finished pieces.
Finally, I want to talk about the content itself. We are not a professional media team; at best “we” are a one-man band with a lot of support. Before February, we were doing our best to produce one podcast every ten days (which we often didn’t achieve), and episodes took anywhere from 3 weeks to 4 months to finalize. We are now releasing podcasts just as fast as we can produce them, and some of our episodes have had a total turnaround time of less than 36 hours! Concerning blogs, we had fallen into a rhythm of only featuring sporadic entries, often comprised of material that someone else had passed our way. Now, we’re releasing several per day, and most with original content. And while we never really did much in the way of multimedia, we’re now working with several artists to adapt our audio material in new and dynamic ways so that it has a further reach.
This increased production is a result of the urgency of the moment, but it has also stretched us beyond our normal capacity. As a result, with nearly every piece we work on, there is always this balance of either spending yet a few more days of further refinement, or releasing what we have and working on the next thing— and there is always a next thing! So I’ve used a kind of internal benchmark that if we can just achieve an 80% quality mark, that’s good enough for the circumstances. So please forgive any slips you may encounter. I recognize that I’m bringing a more exhausted mind into interviews, while also having far less time to do the normal preparation and research. The same goes for essays and social media posting— I may not be bringing my A-game, but it’s the best I can bring to bear under these circumstances, and it is the trade-off that needs to be made in order to keep ahead of the day’s news.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thank you for your support and involvement at this time.