Who Are We
Written by Bobby Nguyen
Wednesday, 08 December 2007
History Active Travel Magazine was launched on a passionate whim and a budget of under USD 1000 in 1997. I remember the figures well; Conde Naste launched their ‘Traveller’ magazine around the same time with a promotional spend of £500,000. The first issue was put together by Tony Tran and myself (Bobby Nguyen), and for some long forgotten reason we titled up the magazine under the snappy name of ‘Independent and Specialist Travel’. Neither of us had any prior experience in magazine production, desk top publishing or coming up with sensible names for magazines.
When I think back to how desk top publishing was then – we had no scanners, no facilities for cropping or altering images, no email, no internet, a single Apple computer with less computing power than the watch I now wear on my wrist – it was pure naivety and huge quantities of Pro-plus that saw us through. Faced with the same conditions and the knowledge I have today, I’d have set a course for a hill in the wilderness, and stayed there, leaving under funded magazines start ups to others. Anyway, it’s now over twelve years on and we’re still a small, independent company with a staff of four hands-on adventurous fanatics backed up by a team of professional and part time freelancers. We still publish just the one magazine, in a publishing industry and specialist sector dominated by big companies with extensive resources and far, far deeper pockets.
In fact, we can’t think of any other outdoor focused magazine that isn’t part of a large corporate publishing machine. It sure puts a smile on our faces when Active Travel Magazine is compared with other outdoor magazines. The reason that we are still a small company is down to this; we never set out to create a publishing empire, just to produce a magazine that we hoped enough of you would enjoy, and buy, and so keep us in a job. We try to do our best, we live the life we write about and we’re passionate about keeping it that way. We’re fortunate that enough of you think that’s good enough. This website is a new development and being a small company with limited IT budgets we’ve built it using ‘open source’ software.
The advantage to us is that open source is free plus it gives us access to the kind of features and support we’d not be able to buy on the commercial market. So a big thanks to all you Joomla developers out there. Developing and maintaining this website is a huge commitment in terms of time for a company as small as ours. However, I'd like to think that this site will eventually become a worthwhile purpose, providing you the visitor with a healthy balance of valuable information, entertainment, interaction and a community of like minded people.
If you like what you see you can help out by logging on and contributing to the forums, blogs, wikiroutes, comments, reviews and I'm always on the look out for good, relevant news stories and features. Thanks for taking the time to visit the Active Travel Magazine site.
Bobby Nguyen
The Team
Bobby Nguyen Founder, publisher, managing editor, on-line editor, tea maker and serial Jaffa Cake buyer. Would like to set up home on the remotest mountain in the world…with an on-line connection.
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Tony Tran Hands on editor of the magazine. Has served her apprenticeship with Active Travel Vietnam over the past seven years doing everything from advertising sales to falling off mountain bikes for the cause. Confirmed gear freak.
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Eric Pham A talented writer who also sells ads for a living and was a member of the Active Travel Team. Has a fever like passion for Vietnamese.
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Laura Nguyen Ad sales, local farm girl, makes the occasional coffee and the guardian of Bess.
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