Today we celebrate the publication of the 1,000th issue of IAG Breakfast Briefing!
Inside Asian Gaming was launched way back in September 2005, so we’re in our 16th year, but at first we were a small English-only magazine. As the years went by, we saw the need for online daily news side-by-side with our monthly magazine.
Our first foray into daily news was through our sister publication WGM, with the very first WGM Daily issuing on Monday 5 January 2015. This popular addition to the industry landscape published online every weekday until Friday 31 March 2017. That weekend we frantically switched all our infrastructure to rebrand our daily news to the IAG Breakfast Briefing we’ve all come to know and love. It was a bit like the frenzied process of the White House staff shifting one president out and the next one in during those few hours of the inauguration ceremony.
And so it came to pass that the very first issue of IAG Breakfast Briefing, issue #1, was sent out at 8am Macau time on the morning of Monday 3 April 2017. The lead story, VIP play leads Macau’s March GGR surge, celebrated the better than expected 18% growth in Macau GGR to MOP$21 billion in the previous month, on the back of a surge in VIP action. How times have changed!
Since that day, we’ve published almost every weekday (in the earlier years we didn’t publish on public holidays) and added Chinese and Japanese language versions of IAG BB.
Today’s 1,000th issue represents a fantastic and consistent effort by the entire IAG team. They are too numerous to mention but I must single out our incredibly hard-working Managing Editor Ben Blaschke, who hits the keyboard as early as 4am to have IAG BB ready for you all at 8am, and our intrepid IT man Wing who puts IAG BB together, sometimes under severe time pressure, from around 7am to 8am each day.
The reliable way in which IAG BB hits your inboxes at 8am — rain, hail or shine — may seem like a calm and smooth operation, but sometimes it’s like a duck paddling on a pond – serene above the water, but legs kicking like crazy underneath! Our eagerness to publish the absolute very latest of overnight news means it’s not unusual for IAG BB to be finished with minutes or even seconds to spare before 8am!
Many readers say that sitting down with IAG BB and an early morning coffee is now firmly entrenched as part of their routine. Hearing that our stories often offer the talking points for 9am meetings is a source of delight for the whole team here.
Thank you all for helping us get through our first 1,000 issues of IAG BB, and here’s to the next 1,000!
