Vol. 2, Issue 53 - End of Year Feature 2024
Looking back over volume 2 of Johto Times, and reflecting on some of the content shared throughout 2024. We also look to the year ahead, and what 2025 may bring for our newsletter
Another year has come to pass, and our final issue of 2024 reflects on the last twelve months of content as a second volume of Johto Times comes to an end. I want to open this End of Year 2024 feature by thanking everyone who has taken the time to read the newsletter this year. Whether you are a subscriber or a casual reader, I hope that Johto Times has offered something interesting for you! I also want to thank the many guests who have contributed to our interviews and memory features, as well as our readers who sent something to our mailbag or left a comment on each issue. It’s time to reflect on what has been going on this year with Johto Times, covering everything from boring statistical data to future ideas and projects!
The growth of Johto Times
In 2023, our little newsletter grew from nothing, to over 500 subscribers before the year was out. It filled me with confidence that the project was a great idea, and took me into 2024 with an optimistic view. While this year has seen slower growth (810 at the time of writing), I am immensely proud of what the project has accomplished so far. My feelings have remained the same: the number of readers isn’t as important as the content Johto Times produces, although reaching even more fans is something I will always appreciate.
There has also been a lot of growth across our social media channels, which have driven traffic to the newsletter. That being said, the vast majority of our traffic (usually over 95% for each issue) comes directly from subscribers who read their email. Due to the challenges of managing multiple social media platforms, however, I may reduce my presence on some of these in 2025, so as to not overwhelm myself. Another interesting bit of data is that our newsletter has an open rate of around 40%. According to my research, newsletters in general receive on average an open rate of 10-15%, which suggests that Johto Times does well at retaining your interest!
I have spent a lot of time this year building up my network by connecting with some of the more prominent fansites, communities and personalities. I am starting to receive comments from people in various communities to say they’ve heard of Johto Times, reassuring me that the work we are doing is being noticed by many people. I’m really happy to say that the vast majority of communities have welcomed Johto Times warmly and have been very supportive to everything the project is trying to achieve.
While I would love to see Johto Times grow to reach more people, the numbers don’t keep me awake at night. I am incredibly proud of what the newsletter has achieved, and I would be quite content with the small to medium following that Johto Times currently has. The comments I receive from our readers have been quite wholesome, and I place far more value on these kinds of interactions than a subscriber count.
Recapping Volume 2 of the Johto Times
In 2024, we managed to share a total of twenty-eight interviews, twelve memories, ten features, and two collection features. While I didn’t share any opinion pieces this year, I am incredibly satisfied with our output this year.
January
We began with a feature on the rumours about PokéGods, Pokémon outside the original 151, which were commonplace between the first and second generations of Pokémon games. I had wanted to write something about them since the newsletter began, so I was excited to kick off Volume 2 with this. We also had a great interview with Pokémon Rebirth, a Pokémon fansite and mixed media fan fiction series which ran from 2001 to 2021. It was great to speak with Gemma about her time working on the website.
February
I finally published a feature I had written over a year prior. The Time I Almost Lost My Charizard is the story of when my Base Set Charizard was almost stolen by a so-called friend. I also shared a concept for a Legends: Celebi video game, similar to Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Finally, it was a great honour to speak to Lady Vulpix, the current webmistress of The PokéMasters, a fansite which was highly significant during the late 90s, and one I used to visit fairly regularly for Pokémon news.
March
I had the great pleasure of speaking with the former General Manager of Pokémon USA, Dave Hillenbrand. Dave shared some fantastic stories about the Pokémon Center New York store and showed us a high-quality scan of the original Lucky Stadium promo card which hadn’t been seen before!
April
I was happy to be able to share an interview with Marills World, a cute fansite I visited all the time when I was a kid. It was great to check in with its webmaster Dom again after so many years! I was also able to interview Jaxel from Universal Pokémon Network, one of the largest fansites during the late 90s. The interview with Nick Roberts, the Editor of Pokémon World Magazine, was also very special. It was an unofficial magazine I would read quite frequently, and it was interesting to hear from Nick about his time working on the publication.
May
We published an interview with Tsukasa Hosono, the winner of the Pokémon Snap Best Photo Contest in 1999. This was our first Japanese guest, made possible thanks to our translator Darts, and we published the interview in both English and Japanese. It was also an opportunity to hear what Pokémon was like for someone growing up in Japan during the earliest era of the franchise.
June
Johto Times published an interview with Tim Street, the Editor of Pokémon Official Magazine in the United Kingdom. This magazine had a short run of two issues, published quarterly. It was very interesting to learn more about it, as well as why it ended so soon after launch.
July
We shared a feature reflecting on Satoru Iwata, the late President of Nintendo, and the impact he had on the Pokémon franchise. This is something I had wanted to reflect on for some time. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Joe Merrick from the massive Pokémon fansite Serebii.net! I have been visiting Serebii since as far back as 2001, and to put together an interview to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Joe's website was a great privilege.
August
We published an interview with Carol Monahan, former Director of Sales & Logistics at Wizards of the Coast, who shared her unique insight into working at the company with the Pokémon Trading Card Game during its earliest days in the West. Later that month, we heard the sad news that Rachael Lillis, the original English voice of Misty, Jessie, Jigglypuff and Meowth in the Pokémon anime, had passed away. I knew that I had to do something to celebrate her life, so I assembled a collection of tributes from fansites of the past and the present. Rachael’s work meant so much to so many fans, and we will continue to celebrate her through the life she gave to these characters that we all cherish so much.
September
The PokeGym kicked things off for September, with PokePop answering questions on behalf of the team and sharing the history of the website, including when it was the official community for Pokémon at Wizards of the Coast. I also had the pleasure of speaking to TR Rose of TRsRockin, a classic fansite dedicated to Pokémon glitches and Team Rocket. Finally, I shared my thoughts on collecting Pokémon cards again, focusing on Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet—151, which had been released a year prior.
October
We had the chance to interview Pokemopolis, an old satirical website which wrote guides on Pokémon anime episodes with their own twist! It wasn’t a website I visited myself, but I often heard positive things about it. I was lucky to track down Dodgemaster Tim, one of the original webmasters, to discuss the history of the website. Later, in contrast to interviewing an old fansite, I interviewed a rather young site that goes by the name Buried Relic, which I hope will continue to find success for many years to come.
November
This was a month of interviews with several great Pokémon fansites, featuring some well-known projects from the very earliest days of Pokémon’s fan communities! We kicked things off with an interview featuring Sunain from PocketMonsters.net, who told us all about their database-driven fansite. We then shared our interview with Frost, one of the admins of Psypoke, a community which dates back to January 1999! We also had the pleasure of conducting an interview with Ryan, the webmaster of Pokémon Abode, an incredibly popular fansite which was online between October 1998–September 2001.
December
During the final month of 2024, we shared some fantastic interviews, including one with Smogon University, the authority on competitive Pokémon battling. It was great to bring together several members of the Smogon team, who took the time to answer our questions. To mark the significant milestone of Johto Times' 100th issue, we invited Stuart Zagnit, the original voice actor for Professor Oak in the English dub of the Pokémon anime, for an interview! This milestone issue caused me to look back and reflect on everything the newsletter has achieved so far. I couldn’t be prouder!
Goals for the year ahead
In last year’s End of Year feature, I outlined some plans that I had for the newsletter in 2024. These were self-imposed targets that I made in order to push myself to take the newsletter further. In this section, I will outline an update on all of these goals and how far we came in achieving them.
I can confirm that a significant amount of work has begun on the Johto Times website! Over the past year, one of our Editorial team, Renan, has been hard at work coding a website from scratch. It should be ready at some point in 2025. From the beginning, I requested that he take his time, that there was no rush to complete this task. The plan is to introduce a community message board, where subscribers and readers of Johto Times can chat together and share their opinions on each issue. I want to thank Renan for working so hard on this in his spare time, and I look forward to revealing more in the year ahead.
One of the main goals, or ‘pillars’, of Johto Times is to document and preserve the early history of Pokémon and its fan communities. This continues to be achieved with the many interviews and memory features that we publish. Last year, I mentioned Project R.O.A.R., a small group which has helped to gather information related to Pokémon’s past and support features that Johto Times may put out in the future. So far, we have been able to discover media and data related to events hosted by Pokémon, as well as some information that was at risk of being lost altogether. Sadly, I haven’t been able to build much momentum in this area, or make as much progress as I would have hoped so far. That being said, I think it’s still a great idea, and it’s a side project that I hope to invest more time into in 2025. I look forward to collaborating with other research groups to assist in their efforts if the opportunity arises.
Finally, I also commented last year that I would be thinking deeply about the growing history of Johto Times and what we will do to preserve our own content. This became even more present in my mind this year when the Internet Archive was brought down by a cyberattack! For a short time, we were unable to use this deeply valuable resource. This made me consider, and then prepare, for the possibility of a world without the Internet Archive. Copies of everything we have done so far, as well as everything we haven’t yet published, are being stored across multiple hard drives locally and off-site.
While I can’t speak for others, I certainly see the information Johto Times produces as valuable and interesting, and I hope that this information will continue to be accessible far into the future. Our attitude towards archival of data began on day one and will continue until our project comes to an end.
Future Plans
As we close out Volume 2 of Johto Times, I want to look ahead to Volume 3 and share my thoughts on the future of the newsletter. During the first two volumes, I felt Johto Times did a great job at reaching a significant number of older fansites that existed during the earliest days of Pokémon. It has been an ambition of mine to document and preserve as much history about the early days of Pokémon’s fan communities as I possibly can. I think I’ve made some significant progress in this area by tracking down the staff of older fansites and doing my best to convince some of the current ones that what Johto Times is doing is worthy of their time, especially the more prominent ones.
As time goes on, I think readers are going to inevitably see fewer interviews with fansites from the earliest days of Pokémon as it becomes harder to reach their original owners. Of course, Johto Times will always do its best to reach as many of these classic websites as possible! While these types of interviews may become less frequent, I think these will gradually be replaced by communities that existed in the mid to late 2000s, right up until the modern day. The present day will eventually become history itself, so we should prepare for that!
In one hundred issues, we have conducted interviews with a wide variety of special guests, from toy makers to voice actors to magazine editors and even bands. Many of these people worked behind the scenes to make Pokémon special for many of us, and their interviews cannot be taken for granted. Each time I am able to speak to these guests, I consider it a blessing, and I will continue to reach out and offer the opportunity for them to share their stories.
There is also an endless amount of personal stories from Pokémon fans, and those will continue to have a home with Johto Times for as long as there are memories to share. I will consider all available options when it comes to publishing new types of content to ensure that Johto Times remains a useful reference of the past.
Closing
That is almost it for our final issue of the year! Johto Times looks forward to 2025 with excitement and optimism. I want to thank my editorial team, which includes Dragonfree, Roy, Renan, Jim, and Dominick for all their hard work, dedication, and support this year. They ensure each issue of the Johto Times is edited on time and delivered to a higher standard than I could do on my own. I appreciate their time and flexibility, as well as their continued friendship that has developed throughout 2024.
Let me end this final issue of 2024 by saying a huge thank you once again to all the people who read this newsletter and for all the kind messages and supportive comments you have made throughout the year. Please continue to share Johto Times with your friends, tell people about the great guests we have interviewed, and help us reach even more fans.
Happy New Year! Look out for Vol. 3, issue 1 of Johto Times, on Thursday, January 2nd, 2025 in your inbox!
Thank you very very much and happy new year!
Great summary! I look forward to seeing what 2025 has in store for Johto Times. By the way, is the Dragonfree in your editorial team the same who posted some great fanfiction on TPM many years ago?