Into our tenth year at The Panama News

This is issue number 1 of volume 10. The Panama News has passed its ninth birthday and gone into double digits.

We have never been profitable in a standard business sense. We have clung to life during the hard years of the Moscoso regime by a severe forced downsizing and more sacrifices than most other small businesses can tolerate. Like thousands of other Panamanian companies, we have been driven to the margins of the informal economy.

This newspaper survives mainly on the sale of advertising, and during a couple of months per year we ask readers to reduce our chronic shortfall by contributions.

This past February, we had to change the computers, programs and templates on which The Panama News is produced on essentially no notice. Our September appeal for reader support had to be delayed due to the worldwide attacks on the Internet, the SoBig.F worm and the Blaster virus. The withdrawal of Citibank from most of its positions in the Panamanian economy left us without a company bank account. Our web server alertly defended us against impostors attempting to talk them into giving up our web management codes, and we have a fairly solid idea of who the would-be intruders were and which stories they wanted to erase. We received some takeover offers that we didn’t accept. We got plenty of raving hate mail, mostly from Americans who believe that The Panama News should fall in line with CNN and Fox, join the George W. Bush cheering section, and censor and distort the news from Panama to reflect that point of view. We got slandered by MEDCOM, which accused Eric Jackson of being a tourist posing as a local journalist, then claimed mistake but refused to run a correction. Competitors in the ad sales market told people that we didn’t exist anymore. The main players in the advertising business, a cartel of agencies that have monopolistic deals with a few media companies, agencies that cheat their clients by neglecting to inform them of their conflicting interests, have pretended that we don’t exist all of these years. Several years ago we were informed that there would be no government ads forthcoming because of our reports on the Moscoso administration’s scandalous behavior.

And you know what? In the last year and one-half we have more than tripled our readership. Our ad sales have also grown, a bit less dramatically.

In the coming year, our tenth, we will face new and difficult challenges. We will again have to adjust and adapt to changing situations. We will surely make mistakes, run corrections and receive our share of well founded criticism.

However, we fully expect to celebrate our tenth birthday next December.

Between now and then, you’ll find us covering an election season, a broad range of Panamanian topics and the activities of Panama’s English-speaking community. We aren’t and won’t be the mouthpiece of any government, powerful family or political party --- except to the extent that such people or institutions may want to buy ads from us in order to present themselves and what they are offering as they see fit. We will, however, take editorial stands in the public interest and open our letters and opinion sections to people with varied opinions.

That sort of independence is why The Panama News persists and grows.

We don’t get all the government advertising that La Estrella gets, but there are far more people reading each issue of The Panama News than is the case with each issue of Onassis García’s pathetic Mireyista propaganda sheet. We don’t have ad agencies funneling business to us, but then again we don’t have our sole pundit trapped in a conflict of interest and kickback scandal along with one of the principal owners, which is the situation in which MEDCOM, Dorita de Reyna and Ernesto Pérez Balladares find themselves in. This time last year he was taunting us from his erstwhile refuge in Nicaragua, but although the now-imprisoned “offshore asset protection guru” Marc Harris tried mightily, he never turned The Panama News into his obedient lapdog. We didn’t triple our readership by publishing lewd or gory pictures, embracing racism or xenophobia, or dumbing down to astrology or gossip about the private affairs of celebrities.

“But that’s what people want,” we can almost hear the captains of the corporate mainstream bleating. Or else it’s the old line about how “This is a business, you know.”

Yeah, yeah. People who want trash know where to get it. But one of the facts about this business --- about “what people want” --- is that when venal and uncultured people come to dominate the main news media, intelligent and open-minded people figure out the score sooner rather than later and seek out other sources of information.

And though we’re never good enough for our own standards, it seems that The Panama News does well enough to attract more and more readers like you.

editorial

Into our tenth year

Bear in mind...