Front page: A new day after a long nightmare

One can, and many people do, look at the new Torrijos administration as just a new lineup sent in to play the same old game. We shall see. Certainly the man would have to work very hard to do worse than the woman he has replaced, and even if great expectations may not be wise, our new president does give us reason for hope on several fronts. A “Patria Nueva”? Don’t hold your breath waiting for it. A better government? That’s not a bad bet.

Martín’s inaugural address was a good start for his administration. After five years of a grim fairy tale presidency, it was refreshing to hear some frank talk about the condition in which Panama finds itself. We are publishing the text of that speech in both English and Spanish, although the uploading of the former may be slightly delayed by the labor of translation.

It appears that this will have been Panama’s last Inauguration Day to be held in September. The package of constitutional changes that Martín Torrijos has been promoting will surely be ratified, and one of the modifications will be a two-month shortening of his term, so that the lame duck period between an election and the new government’s assumption of power will be cut in half, so that future presidents will take the oath in July. To my eyes it’s one of the good points of a flawed and inadequate constitutional reform.

September is also one of the two months in the year when The Panama News asks its readers for donations. We are not a registered charity, but like public television stations in the United States we do perform a public service that’s free to our readers, and unlike those sister media, we do not receive government subsidies.

(Here the government spends way more than it needs to for advertising in the national media, which in part plays a propaganda purpose but is mostly a subsidy. We don’t know what the Torrijos administration’s advertising policy will be. Early in the Moscoso administration we were specifically informed that the IPAT tourism bureau would not buy ads in The Panama News because we reported unflattering things about the government. They exercised their right, and we continued to exercise ours. The incoming administration is closely linked to the ad agency cartel and such PRD and Partido Popular oriented media as the commercial TV networks, La Prensa and El Siglo, and one would expect that most subsidies will flow in those directions. However, this government will start out in austerity mode and advertising would be one of the easier expenses to reduce. On the other hand, although we are not a “tourist publication” our readership numbers and demographics and our ad rates would make The Panama News one of the more effective places for IPAT to advertise. Time will answer these questions, too.)

Anyway, the goals of this particular fundraising month were altered when I became a subject of rather than a mere observer of the news in Mireya’s last days in power. Along with some Cuban terrorists, a whole slew of crooked politicians, a garden variety murderer and dozens of fellow journalists, she put me on her pardon list. That means that I won’t have to go through the expensive motions of defending myself against American scam artist Tom McMurrain. (His criminal defamation case against me was pure garbage, but to demonstrate that in a trial I would have had to pay a court translator big bucks to produce Spanish versions of dozens, maybe even hundreds, of English-language documents.) So none of the funds collected during this appeal to the readers will have to be spent on legal defense.

The Panama News is still in debt and a good portion what you contribute will be dedicated to paying those obligations down.

Moreover, toward the end of this year --- well before our next fundraising month, which will be March of 2005 --- The Panama News will celebrate its 10th birthday. My goal is to publish a tabloid-sized newsprint anniversary edition for the occasion, and as we used to do in our earlier incarnation as a print publicatio distribute it free of charge in various public places. ("Why not charge for it?" you might ask. It's actually more economical and way more efficient to give a publication away than to sell it. By free distribution it's possible to avoid the magazine distribution duopoly and the newspaper distribution mafia, which pose totally obnoxious barriers to this country's cultural development.) If I can raise enough now to publish this special edition, and it enough advertising is sold for that project, then I intend to use the proceeds to resume regular print publication.

A return to print publication is an ambitious goal. In a way it might be said to be a recuperation of ground that was lost in the economic free fall that coincided with the first half of the Moscoso administration, but the aim would be to blaze new trails rather than retrace old steps. The Internet is the future of the newspaper business and the present reality of The Panama News, and even if it turns out that a print edition becomes our main source of revenue it will be a subsidiary of the website and not the other way around. We publish more content in this format than we could afford to put into print. We reach a large international readership that our old print editions never could. But then, it would be nice to have a convenient printed newspaper to read in bed or as you wait in a doctor's office or airport lounge.

The Panama News went online just about the time that the dot-com bubble burst, and now that the hustlers’ exaggerated pitches are a receding memory we are, according to Google search requests, among the top five English-language website about Panama. Notice from the buttons toward the top of the pages in the news section that I am not the only one reporting from Panama in English these days. This publication is way ahead of the others, which is why I'm not uptight about providing links to the competition.

Anyway, despite hard times that forced a painful retreat which still has me sleeping most nights at the office, The Panama News has been growing for some time. Call it a start, a restart or the next leg of a journey that began years ago, but in either case this newspaper is ready to roll.

In keeping with this progress, maybe too slowly but nevertheless surely, this website is undergoing a makeover. There are three noteworthy changes to mention this time.

First, when we did a reader poll earlier this year, the most requested new feature was classified ads. The problem was that the amount of labor required bears no reasonable relationship to the amount of money that can be made. But now I have created a Yahoo group, on which just about anybody can post an email ad and to which you need not belong to read, which you can reach by clicking on the “Unclassified Ads” hyperlink. I won’t have the time to closely monitor the list, but I will periodically remove old ads and do my best to suppress fraudulent messages and deny access to scam artists. I also don’t want to see any vices advertised, whether they be legal ones like alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, gambling or pharmaceutical drugs, and especially illegal ones like banned substances or pornography. Do not abuse this service. Also, please beware and exercise due diligence, because I lack the time and resources to check out, let alone vouch for, everything that will be promoted in this new feature of The Panama News.

Second, and in keeping with my sometimes controversial views about Panama’s language education policies, there is a new feature in the fun section. We are serializing Janet Levi’s trilingual coloring book “Kuna animal words to color” --- that’s “Imar durgan kaya burba sobaled” in Kuna or “Palabras kunas de animales para colorear” in Spanish. (As some of you may remember, I opposed a suggestion to make English the official second language of Panama, but supported legislation to require this country’s youngsters to study at least one second language. English is and will be the most popular second language with or without any official mandate, but I also think that Panama needs to take various steps to popularize and preserve its indigenous languages as well as non-English foreign tongues like French, Japanese, Portuguese, Mandarin, Russian and so on.) This feature is made to be copied, put on paper with your printer, and given to kids to color. It can also be electronically painted with the right computer graphics program. The pronunciations in Kuna and Spanish are more or less in phonetic English, and the English words’ pronunciations are in phonetic Spanish.

Third, the guide to art galleries and museums will no longer have a separate page of its own. It is not being discontinued, but from now on it will be included within the arts section.

Do you consider this project known as The Panama News worthy of continuation? Then make your checks out to “Eric Jackson” --- since Citibank closed down our company checking account along with those of all of their other small business clients the only bank account we use is my personal savings account at Mi Banco --- and mail them to:

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