Recruitment Letter

Before we get much further into this message, the staff of KOMMON wants to send warm thoughts to all of our readers in the aftermath of the horrible event that took place in the Seoul neighborhood of Itaewon (서울 용산구 이태원). It is our sincerest hope that these sort of preventable deaths will not occur in the future.

Dear readers,

This is not going to be an easy message to write, but we felt that it was important to keep everyone who has been with us in the loop.

Since KOMMON was first published in July 2020, our readers have stood by us. When we started accepting donations to enable us to continue creating high quality English-language content about South Korea, our readers stood up to the challenge. We could not have done it without you.

Unfortunately, KOMMON faces a new challenge that threatens its existence.

As a not-for-profit entity, no one on KOMMON’s staff gets paid. Out of all financial donations, 100% goes to operating costs. We are an entirely volunteer-run organization. We are proud of what we have accomplished. But we are currently in a difficult position.

In order to survive, we need more volunteer writers.

The major requirements we have for our writers is that they have high proficiency with both English and Korean, and that they have a solid understanding of Korean culture, history, and politics. We believe that these requirements have allowed us to produce authentic high quality content.

However, these requirements also significantly narrow the pool of potential applicants. Since February, we have been consistently short staffed. The team has worked very hard to compensate, but we knew that it was not sustainable. Although taking the month-long hiatus and introducing the “reader’s digest” issues helped to some degree, the underlying issue remained: we need more writers.

Without more volunteer writers, KOMMON does not have a viable pathway forward.

As an organization, we have agreed that we will neither compromise the quality of our work, nor will we operate in a way that causes undue stress to our team. Without more writers, we fail on both of these counts.

If you - or someone you know - have any interest in writing for KOMMON, please reach out. 👉 staff application form

This is perhaps the most difficult message we have ever had to send. We want to thank everyone for being with us this far. We are hopeful that we will find some way to keep KOMMON running.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

Fred McNulty

Editor-in-Chief

Sunny Um

Chief Operations Officer