 It’s
great to celebrate a milestone, especially in the publishing
world where surviving beyond your first couple of years can
be quite a challenge. Ten years ago, we set forth where no business
association had gone – into publishing a magazine about
the Philippine economic and business scene that was targeted
at a broader audience beyond our own members. We started as
a quarterly magazine in 1994, focusing on the promise of a growth
economy, emerging from the throes of eight-hour power outages
just two years before that. In fact, it was those years of “brownouts”
which forced us to postpone our launch by two years.
By 1997, with several years under our belt, we felt confident
enough to expand modestly to six issues a year. So much for
foresight. By mid-1997, we were caught in the Asian crisis.
Whipsawed by rising printing costs and shrinking advertising
revenues, we seriously contemplated life (and death) of a
magazine. Determined to stay alive, we cut costs through better
production planning and a lowering of our ambitions.
Once we had stabilized, we then nearly tripped over ourselves
in the strategic debate to get caught up in the dotcom craze.
To stay in print or to go digital became our great debate.
Once we decided to get into both, the challenge became to
execute both well and to have one medium complement the other.
Fortunately a young and flexible group of writers – not
to mention a great pair of artists – was up to the double
challenge and painstakingly built up a test website for the
better part of the year in 2001. By 2002, declaring ourselves
ready to face the worldwide web, we launched our companion
website (www.philippinebusiness.com.ph) along with an e-newsletter
for good measure. We’re proud to say the site has become
a hit, even warranting a top ten spot in the latest Philippine
Webby Awards.
And so it goes. We celebrate our tenth year by looking back
at what happened ten years ago and comparing them to today
– the fads, the trends, the laws, and business models
which all came up in the last decade. We hope you enjoy reading
the articles with as much fun as we had in writing them.
|
