Thanks Giving

One week before our 33-day crowdfunding campaign was set to end on July 31, things were not looking good.

We had only reached about 50 percent of our funding target for The New Russian Life project, and while we were heartened by the huge support our audacious plan had received, the gap that remained seemed far too wide.

Oh, us of little faith…

We put out a final call via email and a surge of support turned into a wave. In the end we reached 107 percent of our goal.

Our Russophile tribe had come through again.

You people are amazing.

So, now what?

Now we stop, take stock, and start building.

Much of the structure and technology changes we have in mind have already been sketched out. But we foresee that the content and design changes we are thinking about will be a work in process for the foreseeable future.

We are trying hard to do clean slate thinking. In other words, we are asking ourselves questions like: If we were starting Russian Life today from scratch – creating a robust online publication combined with a beautiful print magazine – what would it look like? What would we put online and what in print? What sort of topics would we cover, and how would we cover things differently than others might? What stories are being missed by others? What are we best suited to create, curate, and build?

Of course, we can’t ignore the reality that we don’t have anything like a clean slate. We have nearly a quarter century of experience publishing a print magazine that readers love. So our obvious goal is to make you love the print version of Russian Life even more, while also making you intrigued to take a look at what we are offering online.

Conversely, in the years ahead, there are many people who will come to learn about Russian Life primarily as a digital publication. How do we entice them to make the jump and fall in love with our “old school” print magazine as well?

We see a synergistic relationship developing between what we do online and what we do in print. And we are just at the beginning of creating that relationship. So we fully expect we will make mistakes and have plenty of growing pains. We ask for your patience and continued input as the process proceeds.

Together, our tribe will figure this out.

Thank you again for your support, and enjoy the issue, which has stories on everything from winemakers to Kalmyks, from modern dance to fishing.