The Panamanian economy seems to have bottomed out, but doesn't appear to be rising very quickly. At The Panama News, our ad sales are up just a bit and Christmas and peak tourism season are just around the corner, so even though we are still clinging to existence by a slender thread, there are rays of hope that weren't there a few months ago.

Certainly things are better than when we were forced out of print and obliged to move out of our former Via Argentina offices a little more than a year and one-half ago.

At the time we had about $21,000 owed to us, virtually none of which we were able to collect or likely ever will. Our immediate debts were around $11,000. We had an ad sales person who quit selling, began to work for another business while receiving a salary to work for us, and then announced that since she was pregnant, we couldn't fire her. Cable & Wireless demanded more than $1,000, which we didn't have, to transfer our phones to the new office. We were not in arrears with them, but owed about $200 on the upcoming bill. Since we couldn't pay their extortion demand, we asked for the phones to be shut off, but they said that phones couldn't be shut off until they were paid, and started adding to our bill, charging us for service we have never received. Their bill for services that we didn't receive, which we do not intend to pay, is sky-high now .

Thus our long march through the wilderness, which saw our transformation from a print newspaper to an online publication, began with frustrations from advertisers who couldn't pay and others who said they couldn't but mananged to keep payments current on their luxury cars. (And if anyone finds out about Gilbert Straub setting foot back in Panama, please let The Panama News know.) Other people's bad debts to us turned into our bad debts to our creditors, which is a lament that we share with many other businesses here.

Similarly, our hard times were complicated by an abuse of the Labor Code, which helped force us into our own defaults under the Labor Code.

And then there were --- and are --- the monopolistic abuses.

Our costs have been cut, but we haven't made much of a dent on our debt. We hope to change that in the coming year.

The Panama News lingered along for more than one year without appearing in print, with an online readership of about 10,000 visits per month, more or less, until this past May. A little windfall was parlayed into a special magazine-style print edition, and although that venture did not go as well as we had hoped, that special edition marked a turnaround in our business. One of the purposes of our special print edition was to advertise our regular online edition, and beginning sometime toward the end of June our Internet readership began to rise, passing the 15,000 mark in September. As of October 23 we were on a course for somewhere around 18,000 visits in October.

Meanwhile we continue to do business as an easily dismissed and sometimes oppressed micro-enterprise.

For example, on May 6 we delivered 250 copies of our special edition to Distribuidora Lewis, the Zelenka family's company, part of the business group that includes Gran Morrison. We were told that we would be given a list of distribution points, so that we could tell our readers where to find The Panama News. We were told that we would be paid in two or three months. Both of those representations were false --- and wouldn't you know that now they tell me that the guy who made those promises doesn't work there anymore. We have also received, in lieu of payment, a series of representations, one of which was that we don't get paid for the magazines that Lewis accepted in May and sold unless we do business with Lewis in a future issue. That outrageous new term has since been superseded by a shifty-eyed "later." When contacted for this story, Lewis's George Zelenka sent us an email stating that "We strongly suggest that you do not print the article as you have it written unless you want to us to take legal action against you according to our lawyers' recommendations." Zelenka said that "the collection issue... is easily resolved" but in fact, Distribuidora Lewis has not resolved it.

Recently we have also been having fun with the banking system. As in Citibank informing us that they don't accept international money orders. As in HSBC giving us an amazing runaround when an advertiser in the Interior attempted to pay us by way of a wire transfer.

These are not your fly-by-night cash laundries, but local branches of major multinational corporations. Panama's international banking district is under assault because of its reputation for washing the ill-gotten gains of the world's kleptocratic politicians and pettier hoodlums. The heyday of money laundering is over, and now this country's banking center must begin to specialize in services rather than excuses if it is to long endure. When small fry like The Panama News are involved, it's perhaps understandable that many of our banks can't be bothered. However, the weeks that it takes for a check from abroad to clear this country's banks --- despite the rather instantaneous electronic nature of the transactions --- doesn't just apply to small companies and has to be counted as one of the important annoyances for an establishment of any size that's considering doing business in Panama. Our slow and customer-unfriendly banking system is clearly one of several major smog sources in Panama's business climate.

And then there's the competition.

We do have some overlap with Carmela Gobern's bilingual Panama CyberNews, a paid email subscription newsletter by a woman who used to work for the US Southern Command's Tropic Times. Art Mokray is a worthy chronicler whose work appears online in the Canal Record. Though these people may be competitors in a sense, The Panama News respects them as worthy colleagues in the small world of Panamanian English-language journalism.

On the other hand, our email box recently included some spam from a BusinessPanama.com, which used the name Business Panama, the other day. In an effort to rustle up ad sales, this outfit claimed 500,000 visits per year. We don't believe that claim.

Moreover, "Business Panama" is the name of the American Chamber of Commerce's magazine, a glossy small-circulation publication that is mostly read by the few hundred AMCHAM members. Queries to AMCHAM about the situation have not been answered (we understand that the person who would answer has been out of town), but a source close to the production of AMCHAM's Business Panama told us that people at the magazine are aware of the website's use of their name, which they consider improper and annoying. BusinessPanama.com did not answer our queries about their readership claim or their relationship to AMCHAM's Business Panama magazine.

We are well used to working in a business environment in which most media inflate the number of people whom they reach in order to hype ad sales. Anyone who knows anything about advertising in Panama knows that and discounts the claims. We go out of our way to be scrupulously honest, but then everybody says that. The BusinessPanama.com hype, however, appears to be yet one more example of overselling the Internet media, a general phenomenon that is largely behind the bursting of the "new economy" bubble and which artificially reduces the credibility and ad selling ability of all Internet publications.

Ah, well. There's unworthy competition out there, but they haven't displaced Panama's independent English-language journalism.

Meanwhile, The Panama News marches on toward better times, despite the obstacles and annoyances.

(Note that these figures are through October 26, so the October graphs are smaller than they will be at the end of the month.)

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