Over the past several months, tweets from two of our former staff members have spread across various social media platforms. These tweets primarily center around miscommunication between them and members of our leadership team that they would be monetarily compensated for any and all work they did for us effective immediately.

At the time of the magazine’s creation, the potential for payment was discussed with members in hopes that the magazine would rapidly gain popularity and sales numbers would allow for all of our staff to transition from volunteers to paid professionals. In hindsight, this was a poor decision on our part. It was based on an idealistic view of the current market and, while most of the staff understood the idea of payment was conditional upon our success, a few people were confused. Once the leadership team was made aware of this confusion, we did our best to make it clear to staff that monetary compensation was not an option at this time, and that we could not promise any set date in the future when that would change.

We mentioned this both in our weekly meetings and via email. We also made it clear that, should anyone decide to leave the staff because of this miscommunication, we would completely understand. While a majority of our staff chose to stay on as volunteers, a couple did choose to leave.

Since then, we have done our best to make it clear to all prospective new staff that all of our positions are volunteer only. We have added a statement to each of our job postings making it clear to any applicant that the position is unpaid. A majority of our staff are still in school, so we hope that working with us gives them the same sort of opportunities an unpaid internship would at another company. Our hope for our staff is that they have the chance to grow their skills in their respective areas, giving them the opportunity to develop and grow samples for their portfolios in a collaborative environment. We allow our staff to choose how much or how little they’d like to contribute each month and allow them to work on their own schedule.

Although a majority of this took place in late 2016 and early 2017, we did not make a public statement at the advice of our marketing director. We hoped to discuss the issues personally with the two affected staff members, however, our inability to provide monetary compensation resulted in our discussions unfortunately not ending on good terms. The recent reappearance of the issue on social media has prompted us to release this official statement.

We would like to publicly apologize for the miscommunication on our part that has caused all this. As a group that is barely a year old, we still have a lot to learn. Mistakes are made. The best we can do is learn from them and do our best to make ourselves a better organization. While we cannot go back in time and correct ourselves, we are doing our best to make sure that no such miscommunication happens again.

As a leadership team, we ask that you do not judge the product of our staff’s hard work on our past mistakes. The Kraze is made up of over 30 staff members from around the world whose hard work and dedication to our goal of creating high-quality content for English speaking K-Pop fans makes all of this possible.

We are always welcome to suggestions on how to make our organization better. Feel free to send us messages directly through our Contact page at any time.