Allow us to break just a moment from our worldwide coffee news coverage for a brief note on some exciting internal developments here at Sprudge. Back in 2013 we launched a program of staffing international “desks” in coffee hotspots around the world. Today, we’d like to introduce our newest Sprudge.com city desk: Hengtee Lim, our new staff writer based in Tokyo.
In its early, funnier days, Sprudge was written entirely by the website’s co-founders, Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman, under the pseudonym Llewellyn Sinclair. Times change and projects grow, and now our network of contributors now includes 50 or so creatives in different cities around the world, authoring freelance material on Sprudge and working with our editorial team to develop new story ideas in their regions. Our staff writers all have one thing in common: they began working with us as freelancers (if you want to freelance for Sprudge, email us here). Desk writers like Anna Brones (Paris), Eileen P. Kenny (Melbourne), Julie Wolfson (Los Angeles), Zac Cadwalader (Texas), and Liz Clayton (New York City) have helped expand the style and tone of our website into what you see today, in the process more than doubling our daily web traffic in the last year. Desks have become part of our daily publishing culture at Sprudge and help make our website better. We <3 our desks.
Hengtee Lim has come the furthest the fastest of any new contributor in Sprudge history, being named to a desk position after just 3 months of publishing with us. An Australian who’s lived and worked in Japan for many years, Hengtee Lim combines strong photo skills with a keen eye for journalistic detail, as evidenced in his recent stories for Sprudge on Fuglen’s new roastery in Tokyo, a series of highlights from a recent Japanese coffee trade event, and this lovingly rendered look at a suspended coffee program in Yanaka. Hengtee Lim is also the author of an excellent personal Tumblr, The HT Report, which focuses on coffee, food, and life in Tokyo.
Tokyo’s coffee scene is undoubtedly among the most exciting in the world right now, but there’s a dearth of regularly published English-language content about it. Our readers in London, Los Angeles, and all points between have responded immediately and enthusiastically to our expanding coverage of the Tokyo coffee scene, and we’re very excited to be publishing regular dispatches on it from Hengtee Lim. This announcement means expanded coverage of all things coffee in Tokyo on Sprudge, as well as the beginning of increased Sprudge coverage throughout Japan.
As a final bit of internal shopkeeping, we’ll also take this moment to let you know that Alex Bernson, who has served for the last year as Sprudge’s Assistant Editor, has been promoted to Managing Editor at Sprudge.com. Thanks to Alex Bernson’s editorial guidance in the last year, the viewership of our website has exploded while we continue to maintain high editorial standards; this is no easy feat. A new title means that along with managing our network of contributors, Alex Bernson will take an increased daily role in publishing the website alongside our Associate Editor, Liz Clayton, and Sprudge.com’s co-founders Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman.
Sprudge.com remains an independent media company based in Portland, Oregon, with staff across North America, Europe, Australia, and now Asia. For a full list of desk writers and contributors, please visit our About page. For more on the ultimate goals of our global desk strategy, please see here.
You can read Hengtee Lim’s first piece as Tokyo Desk Writer here.