Our editors, over the past twenty odd years, have generated a vast amount of content. Each month we have published at least seven or eight feature articles as well as various columns and reviews. Some we have been proud to have seen published in respectable international media, some we are ashamed to say have been spotted in quite disreputable tabloids. We have created online and offline content. We have interviewed celebrities, heroes, heads of industries, our friends, random strangers; we’ve covered social, cultural and political issues; we’ve helped our clients to write advertorials to entice you to go and support their various businesses; we’ve tried to be funny, and, occasionally, were funny; we’ve argued, pontificated, soliloquised, opined and written utter rubbish. We’ve coined words and phrases, congratulating ourselves on our masterful command of our written language, and we have made utter pillocks of ourselves with spelling mistakes and editorial errors. While our hammer at times completely misses the nail’s head, we have, for two decades, hammered away, in English, about Chiang Mai and the north of Thailand. And we are still amazed, and pathetically grateful, that you read us.
Over a fresh coconut and a particularly impressive sunset in Samui a year ago, I decided that it was time for us to come up with something new. Monthly schmunchly, I scoffed to my then husband, let’s do daily! As some rum flowed into my coconut, the idea began to form for an online news service, a dynamic web site where news, opinions, reports, blogs and all sorts of pithy and wonderfully written content about Chiang Mai, and relevant to those living in Chiang Mai, can be found.
Upon returning to the office (and reality) I shared my great – though admittedly hardly original – idea with the team who fortunately were just as enthused by my cunningly coined new project, CityNews. We bought the domain name www.ChiangMaiCityNews.com, James Austin Farrell was asked if he was up for it – he was – and we set a tentative launch date for sometime in 2012.
So here we are. April 2nd 2012, James Austin Farrell will no longer be writing for Citylife, his professional – and at times less so! – home for the past seven years. He will be editor of ChiangMaiCityNews.com, a daily news site, mainly in English, but with some Thai content, which we hope will soon become your daily local news fix.
We are starting humbly; after all we are all completely new at this, and we beg your forbearance for any mistakes we will be making…and we will. We will inform, we will report, we will blog and we will blather, and as time goes by, and with feedback from you – ruthless or gentle – we will improve and we will expand and hopefully we will be a great resource for you all on what is up and coming in Chiang Mai, in a way that a monthly magazine can never achieve. Citylife will remain Citylife, a magazine filled with feature articles, interviews, silly and fun bites and me as editor. We will feature less news worthy columns, and perhaps head in a more lifestyle direction. CityNow! will remain CityNow! with events up and coming as well as social photos of past happenings featured daily by our outrageously hardworking friend Steve Yarnold. And CityNews will, fingers crossed, grow to become an online resource for news which will complement our wonderful city.
So this is not a farewell to James – after all his office is still ten metres away from mine, and I can still hear him singing in it every day – but a new introduction to James, a more newsy James!
We are nervous, we are excited, we are terrified, but we will, with your support, do our very best to create the ultimate (well, to be fair, only) daily news site in English in the north of Thailand.
Please visit ChiangMaiCityNews.com, the site will start small, but we have many more features and bells and whistles which we will be adding over the coming months.
We hope you like it…
Citylife this month:
It is fitting then, that this month we feature a Nostalgia theme, taking a look back at some of Chiang Mai’s iconic long standing businesses. I interview Sabina Fay Braxton who has recently returned to live in Chiang Mai, where she lived in the early to mid seventies, a dynamic and internationally acclaimed textile designer. Tom Fawthrop, South East Asian correspondent to the Washington Post and Economist, among other impressive publications, writes a thought provoking article on opium growth in the region and Grace Robinson talks to a long term expat about his boat journey down the Ping River.
Our editors, over the past twenty odd years, have generated a vast amount of content. Each month we have published at least seven or eight feature articles as well as various columns and reviews. Some we have been proud to have seen published in respectable international media, some we are ashamed to say have been spotted in quite disreputable tabloids. We have created online