Most ads are interactive -- click on them to visit the folks who make The Panama News possible

front page

Photo by Eric Jackson

Sound the alarm?

One common concept of what a newspaper ought to be is a literate watchdog. That's why you have so many papers that call themselves the "Sentinel" or the "Guardian" or so on. It's a legitimate and necessary function, but as with the little boy who cried wolf, it can be depreciated by abuse.

Then you have "infotainment" and "infomercial" concepts. The former tends to fill people's minds with fiction and trivia that are of little use in confronting daily realities. The latter is quite often designed to convince people to buy products, services and concepts which if they were fully informed they'd realize are not in their best interest to obtain. However, if becoming informed about the world around us is not fun it tends to creates a society of ignoramuses, and without advertising a lot of things that make people's lives better would remain unknown and disappear from the market and a lot of good ideas would never catch the public imagination.

It seems to me that there are many balances that ought to be made in the news media, and I'm not talking about value-free "objectivity" or "he said she said" spin doctoring in lieu of truth. I'm talking about how best to offer a public service to the readers, how to be fair to those with whom one disagrees, how to maintain some semblance of quality despite scarce resources.

Maintaining quality sometimes serves to reduce resources. I have been told so many times that The Panama News would sell more ads if it curbed its coverage of the games that politicians play, if we didn't report real estate scams as such, if we dumbed down to astrology and gossip about celebrities. I think that mostly this is a false promise, but it is true that some wealthy people whom we have offended over the years have found other English-language venues in which to buy ads. But then, those publications don't draw as many readers as we do because once a publication is known as a mouthpiece for scam artists most people turn away from it.

With this issue I am now into my 12th year of trying to strike these balances with The Panama News, attempting to discover and share the joys of life in Panama, witness and warn about the unfortunate side of it and provide a useful service to readers and advertisers alike. Resources are finite, often ridiculously so, and thus priorities are set and choices are made.

One of the choices that The Panama News made early on was about the readers we try to reach. At first there was a demand coming mainly from Florida that the publication be some sort of Zonian nostalgia sheet, complete with early 60s hostile attitudes toward most things Panamanian. There were those who wanted a "gringo paper," and with the changing demographics of the English-speaking community here there is the demand that to be relevant we must be the "expat paper." But The Panama News set out to serve this country's English-speaking community, which includes a large West Indian component and a lot of people who speak English as a second language. When economics forced us to suspend print publication and concentrate on our online edition, that changed the demographics again, but we found that decisions made early on shaped the sort of international readership that we attracted. This website's notions of what's fit and important to publish have as they attracted an ever larger readership also driven certain people away.

For example, not long ago I was taken to task by a US military retiree for being disrespectful to his friend, the millionaire pedophile ex-priest Ron Kelly, whom the government has allowed to live here despite his conviction on 10 counts of child molesting in Canada. I have been criticized for my lack of competence in what is asserted to be the very important subject of the genealogies of Panama's aristocratic families. I have been told to "get a life" in response to my published observations of the systematic exclusion of this country's dark-skinned majority in advertising and many other spheres of national life.

But for all the off the wall gripes like those, there are more honest disagreements with the opinions I hold and the ones I publish in The Panama News, more conscientious corrections of mistakes I make, more requests to publish things that really do belong on this website, more letters to the editor expressing sincerely held and well informed points of view that I happen not to share.

I try, and with a bit of help from a lot of friends this project continues.

Am I too scathing in this issue's editorial? I'd argue that especially stupid and destructive ideas ought to prompt commensurate scorn. Do I go too far afield in the review of notable personalities of 2005? Well, I don't write for simpletons and the world is a complicated place. Is the lead business story not really a business story? Ah, but sports is a business and The Panama News has always taken an expansive view of what constitutes a business story, one that includes the lady who sells meat on a stick from a pushcart as well as the guy who sits in a bank tower office with a view. Might a warning contained in the travel section frighten foreign visitors away? Probably, but to the extent that it leads people to think about the world around them and act more prudently it will reduce the number of unhappy experiences and thus make Panama even more attractive. Will anybody read our sports feature and pass the information along to their favorite NCAA baseball coach? One can only hope.

And I do hope that you find this, the first issue of our 12th year, worthy of your attention.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson

the editor