opinion

Into our 12th year

by Eric Jackson

In December of 1995, The Panama News first appeared in a tabloid-sized free-distribution print form, as a special introductory issue to show potential advertisers. Three people did almost all of the production work on that issue: graphic designer Elida Jaén, photographer and journalist Fernando Francisco and me.

The tale of this publication over the ensuing 11 years has been one of successes and setbacks.

Precious few of the former have been in the financial field. We are not hooked into a familial or kickback relationship with the ad agencies’ cartel, we are not an appendage of any political party, we don’t grovel at the feet of any government and we don’t accept prostitution ads, so never mind that we have more readers than some of the Spanish-language dailies, the big ad accounts have rarely been interested. Were our reasons for existence limited to the pecuniary, we’d have gone out of business rather immediately. If I had dependents to raise, an ego that needs a middle class gringo income to support or wasn’t that crazy, I’d have thrown in the towel long ago. But here it is, more than a decade later, and nearly five years after a series of reverses forced The Panama News out of print and me into living in our low-rent little office in Perejil, and we broke all of our readership records repeatedly during the course of 2005.

I still get plenty of calls and emails from would-be advertisers who presume that any news website that’s into volume 11 is the sideshow of a print publication, and when they learn otherwise that’s generally the end of the matter. But meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times just announced that they are stopping publication of their East Coast edition because their loyal readers on the Atlantic side of the USA now mostly get it online. In fact the LA Times has more readers than ever thanks to the Internet. When I made the decision to continue publication on the Internet, it was not just a move forced by serious hard times in the Panamanian economy. It wasn't only forced by an ad sales person who was on salary but working for someone else’s business on The Panama News’s dime suddenly announcing that she hadn’t sold any ads for the upcoming issue and was pregnant so we couldn’t legally fire her. It was a choice made with the reasonable certainty that the Internet is the future of the newspaper business, an estimate that the LA Times’s announcement tends to confirm.

Ever since we went out of print I have been yearning to get back into hard copy publication, and that desire still burns as strongly as it ever has. However, things have changed over our nearly five years in the cyberwilderness. Our readership demographics, the composition of the English-speaking community in Panama, the concentration of control over the Spanish-language mainstream media into fewer hands and the amount of competition out there head the list of things that are different. When we get back into print --- not if --- it will be in part the result of business alliances that could not have been foreseen five years ago, and the print edition will be secondary to the website rather than the other way around as it was when we first went online.

From the guy who stole my address book and left a bullet on my desk back in 1994 (who’s still around, offering lame competition) to the shills for every hustler who comes around with a buck or two for advertising, I have never worried very much about those competitors who vow to put me out of business. In the news section I provide links to my worthy competitors, folks like Carmela Gobern and the Cyberspace News, Okke Ornstein and Noriegaville, and the new publications that have sprouted up in Bocas and Boquete. (If you want to click onto the pirates and charlatans, however, you’ll have to look them up yourself.) I originally decided to add such links because the resources that the contributors to this publication and I have available don’t allow us to cover Panama as completely as I think we ought to and that same situation applies to all of the rest of this country’s English-language press. It is for much the same reason why The Panama News sometimes publishes things about astronomy, but never has had an astrology column: I want a publication that’s informative, useful and entertaining for intelligent people like you and have found a lot of people who appreciate that.

This past year in Panama we have seen an unholy alliance of church and state to remove dissenting voices from the Spanish-language mainstream media but also a steep decline in the use of bogus criminal defamation prosecutions to intimidate journalists. We have seen the far right and the criminal element in Panama’s American community --- again! --- seeking to establish their own media presence, and the failure of such people to make inroads into The Panama News readership. We have seen the Sindicato de Periodistas --- a “union” that has never had a collective bargaining contract by which it defends the rights of workers from management’s predations --- tighten their de facto restrictions aimed at excluding Panama’s foreign-language press from access to the government, but also an increasing tendency of prominent Panamanians from across the political spectrum to submit things for us to publish.

The bottom line on the competition? People are a lot more capable of detecting the smell of garbage than the cartels, partisan spin doctors, wannabe monopolists and hustlers think.

(A discerning readership is, of course, a double-edged sword. When this journalist messes up as even the best of us do, he gets complaints about it from the readers and, unlike the most pompous of Panama's media, The Panama News runs corrections when errors are brought to its attention.)

So The Panama News heads confidently into its 12th year after having grown in its 11th. The contributors and I have every intention to improve and expand the product over the next 12 months. If there are any particular New Year’s resolutions, they would be to get better about meeting deadlines and to grow the little group of people who write and take pictures for this publication in 2006.

And I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the changes to come.