By Gene Ching
I love the title ‘Return of KungFuMagazine.com.’ It echoes several classic Kung Fu films like Return of the Dragon or Return to the 36th Chamber. And I love the fact that we are returning – not only KungFuMagazine.com here but also Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine – IN PRINT.
You read that right. Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine is coming back in print. But things will be very different than before. The world has changed since then.
Before we get into the details, let’s go back to the end when Kung Fu Tai Chi first ceased publication. It was over five years ago, 2020, when our newsstand magazine died of Covid.
The Death of Kung Fu Tai Chi
When the pandemic struck, we were so close to submitting our SUMMER 2020 issue to the printer. We were all furloughed, sheltering in place as the world went into quarantine. This was the death blow to large newsstands. Already in the shadow of internet publishing, the newsstands had been struggling for years, and niche magazines like us required a large newsstand to get displayed. Kung Fu Tai Chi was barely hanging on. As we watched the shelter in place continue, we saw the remaining large newsstands go the way of landline telephones and cassette tapes. The writing literally was on the wall. Large newsstands were extinct.
On May 12th, 2020, I was tasked to announce that Kung Fu Tai Chi was ceasing publication. Our subscriber base was not big enough to sustain us without newsstands. Our final issue was our SPRING 2020 and I was proud that it was a strong issue. In our last few years, we had hit upon a solid groove with our content and those final issues all delivered. I was glad to have ended on a positive note.
We shifted to KungFuMagazine.com, which we’ve had since 2001. Once Covid lightened up, we began publishing again, continuing our tradition of posting exclusive articles every week and bi-weekly sweepstakes. It was all free access; we only asked that readers patronize our sponsors, MartialArtSmart.com. In 2023, we relaunched Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championships, which had been on hiatus since the pandemic, and we have run it up to this year.
However, this year, just when registration for Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championships opened, more catastrophes struck. KungFuMagazine.com crashed.
KungFuMagazine.com K.O.ed
KungFuMagazine.com was a custom-built site. Web content management systems like WordPress didn’t exist back then. After a quarter of a century, KungFuMagazine.com was showing signs of internet age. As plug-ins became obsolete and components fell behind with system updates. We were making repairs as things fell apart and were beginning to work on a major overhaul when KungFuMagazine.com was knocked out cold. Lights out. It was a devastating crash.
We did back it all up. However, reprogramming it to what it was more work than to update it to what we were planning. We just needed to accelerate our update. Instead of posting a ‘closed for construction’ on our site, we set up a temporary site. This allowed us to keep publishing over last summer and into this fall. Those articles already have been transferred here to our new site.
The return of KungFuMagazine.com has been a three-phase plan. PHASE 1 was to restore the forum. After it collapsed with KungFuMagazine.com, we recovered the data and bumped it up to the most recent version (that update was overdue). But just a few weeks after being restored, the firewalls were breached and a stampede of spambots raided the forum. I have no idea how they got past the approval gate. And with the new forum, I couldn’t figure out how to do a global deletion, so I had to ban each spambot and delete every post manually. It was hundreds of posts, and it stole a day of work from me. Consequently, we migrated to a completely new forum provider, one with stronger security.
On Halloween, we opened our new forum. There was a trick to that treat. Our new security requires a stronger password, so veteran members must use the ‘I forgot my password’ function to update themselves.
Return of KungFuMagazine.com
Getting KungFuMagazine.com rebooted here was PHASE 2. As you’ll see, we’ve moved a lot of stuff around. We are in the process of restoring our article archive. If you dig into the archive right now, you’ll see some articles where the graphic is just an ad. Those are in the process of restoration. Please excuse our dust. There are over 500 exclusive articles in our archive. It’s going to take some time to restore them all. Meanwhile we will continue to bring free exclusive articles and sweepstake giveaways every week. And we’ll keep the lights on the forum lit for you. It’s still a plentiful searchable database and a place to discuss anything from training techniques to passing on time-honored traditions to the latest movies, or whatever as long as it isn’t troll-ish.
What’s new is that now you can subscribe to KungFuMagazine.com for just $5 a month. That gives you access to all the back issues of Kung Fu Tai Chi in digital format and all the instructional videos in the TC Media library. Well, not all of it right now because we’re rebuilding that too. At this writing there are over 19 back issues and 30 instructional videos – DVDs converted to streaming, with weekly drops of more. We’ll have everything up soon enough.
In addition to this, subscribers will get exclusive access to the Brand-New Kung Fu Tai Chi Winter 2025 issue. Subscribe for a year and Tiger Claw will give you a $15 rebate for MartialArtSmart.com with every quarterly issue. That’s $60 of credit over the year, which completely refunds your annual subscription fee. You can subscribe here. We greatly appreciate your support.
Return of Kung Fu Tai Chi
But wait. At the beginning of this, I said IN PRINT. Beyond the digital version, the WINTER 2025 issue of Kung Fu Tai Chi will be available in print. This is PHASE 3.
We will be doing a limited print-on-demand run. Unfortunately, small print runs are much more expensive for us than when we were printing tens of thousands of issues for the newsstands. The cost of print issues will more than triple in price. This is one of the reasons academic journals are so expensive. The less you print, the more it costs per unit. These limited print issues will be reserved for our collectors, our true supporters, and anyone who pre-order them.
Our new WINTER 2025 issue is a keeper. It revisits one of the most popular articles that Kung Fu Tai Chi ever published. “The Kung Fu’s Top 100 Styles of the Millenium” was written by Editor Martha Burr and me for our first issue of the new millennium, the JANUARY 2000. Publisher Gigi Oh and our Advertising Account Joan Chien revised and updated it, replacing a few of the more obscure styles with systems we’ve discovered over the last twenty-five years. As issues go, it’s worth the investment. We sold out of our backstock of the original print issue long ago.
What’s more, Gigi was among the last foreigners to visit Shaolin Temple last summer, before the Abbot was denounced and replaced. I’m launching a new column titled ‘Straight Out of Shaolin’ where we will continue to follow the saga of the original Shaolin Temple of China. A lot has happened at Shaolin since the pandemic and what happened on Gigi’s trip will get you up to speed.
Also in this new issue, we’ve relaunched many Kung Fu Tai Chi favorites: Featured Weapon, Kung Fu Horoscopes, Fast Forward to the Fight Scene, and more. You can preorder a print version of our WINTER 2025 here.
KungFuMagazine.com and Kung Fu Tai Chi are under new management. Previously, we were overseen by TC Media International, a dba of Tiger Claw . TC Media will continue to manage our primary sponsor, MartialArtSmart.com. However, we are now under a new company, KFMagazine Inc.
Whether you support us by investing in a print issue or subscribe to us digitally, or both, please support us. It’s seldom when another chance like this arises – a shot at redemption. It might be a longshot, but we will feed this new model for our publication with the best content we can find – to preserve and propound the culture and glory that is Chinese martial arts.
Thank you for your continued support.
About author:
Subscribe to KungFuMagazine.com here.
Reserve your print edition of the WINTER 2025 here.
Gene Ching is the Publisher of KungFuMagazine.com and the author of Shaolin Trips.
Tread:
https://forum.kungfumagazine.com/t/kungfumagazine-relaunch-2025/62941
