You may have noticed a slight change this week: our name has been shortened from beijingkids to simply Jingkids International.
What is this sorcery, you may ask? Is this a knockoff product produced by pirates? Have we been taken over by some external force? Are we leaving Beijing?
Nope, it’s still us, the same beijingkids you’ve come to know and (hopefully) love for a decade and a half.
The name change is something we’ve anticipated for over a decade, and believe it or not, marks the fourth (!) name we’ve used for this magazine in the 14 years since we published our first product in the spring of 2006.
Back then, we launched as a small quarterly handbook called Kids in Beijing, which was part of our now-discontinued Immersion Guides book series:
We produced four of these to great fanfare. Reader demand moved us to a full-on monthly magazine the next year, which we named tbjkids (using the “tbj” from thebeijinger, from which we sprung).
This lasted for 17 months until we expanded the name to deepen the connection to Beijing, by rebranding as beijingkids at the same time Beijing was hosting the 2008 Olympics:
We soldiered on with that name until we decided to launch our Chinese edition in 2012, which we named Jing – not the “jing” from the word Beijing (京), but the homonym Jing (菁), which is a component of words such as essence, luxuriant and elite.
Since that time, our Chinese brand Jing has grown by leaps and bounds, expanded to Shanghai, and become more and more of a central brand. Though the contents of each magazine are entirely independent, much of what we do – such as our school choice expos and our school choice guides – are joint efforts, and thus it only made sense for us to unify our efforts into one brand.
Our commitment to you as Beijing’s Essential International Family Resource remains the same. You can still find us at our URL at www.beijing-kids.com and on WeChat at bjkids, and you can reach us at our same email addresses.
Thanks for your continued support!
Michael Wester
CEO and Co-Founder,
True Run Media
Images: Pexels
