Did the New Naratif Civil War destroy New Naratif?

In April 2022, New Naratif raised the alarm. For the very first time, despite several years of releasing "accountability reports" to his subscribers and the public at large, Dr PJ Thum, the managing director of the website and director of its holding company Observatory Southeast Asia Pte Ltd, admitted to a crippling financial shortfall. Subscriber numbers have been misreported, subscription fees not collected, leading to a corrected revenue shortfall of USD 40,000. Not soon after, he appears to have let go almost all his editorial staff. Even now, New Naratif's restructuring is still in progress as it pivots to a different business model, publishing angle, and reason for existence.

This is par for the course for any financially distressed enterprise—until the staff laid off by Dr Thum chose to fight it out in the public. They allege that Thum misled both his readers and staff. Thum accused the staff of attempting to subvert his management, and furthermore accused them of waging a disinformation campaign. The staff stand by what they said, noting that documented evidence (presumably in the reports and subscriber emails) supports their narrative, not Thum's.

English Civil War woodcut in pamphlet, c.1643

In a fit of madness, Thum and his former employees have fired off the equivalent of ICBMs in a mutually-destructive civil war. Both sides may refuse to issue further responses but the damage is done.

Why was New Naratif an obvious failure?

Even though they disagree on why it happened and what should have been done, both factions agree that the project was in financial distress. It is possible to independently confirm this fact from publicly available information, largely from New Naratif's previous "accountability reports" and its last reported annual returns and bi-annual reports.

How many staff did New Naratif employ? How many articles did it publish, and how frequently? Did its articles even reach its intended audience? Did its articles have any real, measurable impact? By any measure, the metrics do not paint a picture of success but rather prove that this project is unsustainable.

Before the redundancy exercise, New Naratif had 12 permanent staff members. Yet New Naratif published 82 "pieces of content" in that half-year period. There were 6 "editorial staff" or actual content producers, 5 management staff, and himself. From these numbers, we can already identify three management blunders made by Dr PJ Thum, managing director of New Naratif:

• Too many staff hired to publish too little content (less than 2 articles per content creator per month)
• Too many management staff hired to oversee content creators (1:1 ratio of managers and workers)
• All staff paid too much for what they were delivering (1,000 USD per month per person might be a pittance, but really a princely sum after factoring in the output expected and the cost of living in Southeast Asia ex Singapore, where most of the writers appear to be based)

Impact-wise, Dr Thum's "accountability report" offers a count of "unique pageviews" of the most read pieces of content in the last 6 months. But he has offered a meaningless and irrelevant factoid instead of answering: What is the average count from its own website as well as its other social media platforms? What is the average engagement rate for each platform?

New Naratif's FaceBook, Twitter, and Instagram pages have engagement rate that fall far, far below the acceptable industry standard of 1-5% for the number of purported followers on each platform. This indicates any or all of the following:

• New Naratif's reported subscription rate and its follower rate on social media are unreliable.  Indeed, the last available "accountability report" admits to "an inaccurate count of members... inflating the numbers".
• Its followers are mostly fake accounts and bots, a common occurence in social media publishing.
• The "unique pageviews" of its most popular content are likely the result of bot activity.
• Its subscribers are simply not interested beyond just supporting the project through the act of subscribing.

Dr Thum attributes his revenue shortfall and inaccurate subscriber count to many subscribers who "signed up for a membership but never sent in their payment", "paid for their first year/month by bank transfer but... did not renew", submitted "credit card information invalid so autorenewal could not process their payment". Setting aside the possibility of deliberate accounts fraud, it is likely that some New Naratif subscribers simply bolted after realising the paucity of content.

Were the staff wrongfully dismissed?

A cull of New Naratif staff was most certainly in order, given the situation. Thum should have asked most of the management staff to take a hike and then halved the editorial staff or content creators, instead of firing the entire editorial team. Nonetheless, we will examine the objections of the former staff to their firing.

Wrongful dismissal? Regardless of the deteriorating relation between Thum and his managers on one hand and the editorial staff on the other, an offer was made to immediately end their employment with one month's pay in lieu of notice, and accepted by the editorial staff. That is the standard and lawful form of termination in Malaysia, which is the operating jurisdiction for Observatory Southeast Asia Sdn Bhd, the entity that employs and pays the New Naratif staff to provide content that New Naratif, owned by Observatory Southeast Asia Pte Ltd, subequently publishes.

False pretext? The former staff allege that PJ Thum was not completely truthful to them about the reasons for the financial distress of New Naratif. They also allege Thum offered a slightly different account in his update to subscribers. We point out again that immediate termination with one month's salary was made in lieu of written notice, entirely in line with The Employment Act 1955. Perhaps none of the former staff (all millennials?) have not experienced working for formerly lucrative web publishers who had to downsize, pivot, or even foreclose when the tech/web bubble burst; the common practice is to offer a measure of charity towards one's former employer and allow them to craft whatever narrative they need, to count their blessings for having gotten years of above-average wages for delivering below-average work, and to leave on good terms knowing their stint at the publisher is a gold star on their CV.

Abusive behaviour? The staff allege that upon receiving their requests for more information on the books and unsolicited advice on restructuring New Naratif, PJ Thum brought in a lawyer to read them the riot act, claiming that communicating with one other was grounds for termination. This pales in comparison to horror stories of actually abusive bosses. Note however, that Thum did not cite this in his eventual termination of their employment; it was done legally with 1 month's pay in lieu of notice. For PJ to accuse his staff later in public as perfidious, treasonous, and mutinous is perhaps an indication that at long last, Thum is in thrall to the idea that it is fair for self-declared liberals to resort to illiberal, even underhanded means in order to defeat their illiberal enemies...

Original Sin: The rise of New Naratif and the long shadow of George Soros?

In their allegation of unfair dismissal, the former staff made much of the 40,000 dollar billing error. What they're really sore about isn't the billing error, but everything else it entails.

The half-year financial statement indicates that New Naratif outsources its book-keeping to a third party accountant once a year. For many years, that accountant apparently failed to notice a shortfall of expected revenue and the bank balance of the company account. The bigger question is who then controlled the company bank account? Who then prepared the half-yearly "financial statements" to New Naratif subscribers? Who failed to notice that persistent and growing shortfall, and reported figures that didn't actually tally with the real world bank account? How did New Naratif manage to receive "grants" (from undisclosed third parties, no less) who normally would demand regular full audits and not just an unaudited financial statement? Why is Thum so reluctant to begin proceedings to retrieve the subscription shortfall from the third-party subscription service? And why would the company secretary, a Malaysian resident in the UK and owner of a corporate secretarial firm, extend a loan of 14,000 GBP (as reported in its "accountability report") to a financially distressed client?

It is likely the former employees were aware that they were overpaid and their company stuffed with too much management fat, all while implausible accounting errors were made for months and years. How can a company continue to pay for all this while running itself into the ground? For all this to happen, a reasonable conclusion might be: New Naratif has always had secret, undeclared, perhaps unlimited sources of funding. In that case, some employees might believe that the company has a responsibility to ensure that the gravy continues to flow to everyone, and not fire anyone at the drop of a hat. And if you believe that, you'd also believe that the announcement of a 40,000 USD billing error is no more than a manufactured crisis.

Outside New Naratif, would any reasonable person believe that the website had secret, undeclared sources of near unlimited funding?

Can PJ Thum and New Naratif pivot or will they sink?

Rehiring writers? It is a pity that Dr PJ Thum has followed up his sacking of the entire editorial team with yet another management level hire. New Naratif is now at 1 content creator (Thum himself) and 7 managers (As Thum would count twice as both a content creator as well as manager), and still zero other editorial staff. New Naratif cannot resolve its problem of too much management fat overseeing a team of writing staff producing too few articles. This is an unsustainable structure that will sink New Naratif.

Pivoting to research? New Naratif is offering to pay 2K USD for researchers on various topics. We believe is the real restructuring plan, to ditch publishing activities and refashion New Naratif into a private micro research institute or think tank.

There's a problem, though. 2K USD is a pittance. Sure, it can be a princely sum after factoring in the output expected and the cost of living in Southeast Asia ex Singapore, where these researchers will likely be based. But even then, New Naratif is not a credible think tank or research institute. This is no career path to an academic position. 2K USD would be a fair wage if Dr PJ Thum were a tenured professor at Oxford, the research work implicitly tied to PJ serving as mentor and guarantor of an good academic career in a western university or its think tank and research institute affiliates. As it stands, we do not expect any competent takers for the research positions offered by New Naratif.

Foreclosure? We note that the billing error and revenue shortfall will need to be reported to Companies House, with the necessary corrections and adjustments made to the financial statements of all affected years in a directors' resolution, by the next Annual General Meeting and annual filing. Will Dr PJ Thum bet that Companies House in the UK or the Companies Commission in Malaysia will not ask any further questions of him, his accountant, or the company secretary? Or will he begin moves to shut down New Naratif?