Okke Ornstein in Panama | Dispatches from the isthmus

Eric Jackson writes today on Panama Forum that The Panama Star, the English language paper/supplement of La Estrella, has ceased to exist.

Well, it was about time.

Jackson lists some reasons for the failure:

- It never really had a full-time editor, which might not have been so bad except that so much of the content was by people who wrote English as a second language, imperfectly

- There was never any serious effort to sell advertising

- There was never any serious attempt to promote it in the English-speaking community

- The layout and graphics were, at the final stage, left without supervision in the hands of people who didn’t know English, so methodically butchered headlines, mismatched captions and photos and attempted to shorten articles without understanding the language they were editing

- The office politics got obnoxious

- The attempt to shift from volunteer contributors to paid staff came at a bad economic time for Panamanian media and advertising, and they found that they couldn’t hire a competent staff for what they were willing to pay.

Which Panamanian newspaper is next?

I’d be a bit harsher even. For starters, the paper was run by old farts. Dinosaurs who, like Richard Koster, for example covered stories that others had already covered long before them.  The paper had nothing to offer to an increasingly young, progressive and culturally advanced crowd that is moving to Panama and instigates or collaborates with cultural and/or political initiatives like those of La Casona, Porto Diao or even the great opera revival. They were basically stuck in the type of reporting from the days of the Zonians, serving the Hawaii shirt brigade with editorials on how their condo investments would be doing in the future.

Then, these dinosaurs made some blunders that are simply beyond comprehension. They never published under their own domain name but remained buried within the site of Spanish language La Estrella. The print distribution was done in a similarly retarded fashion, with the Panama Star hidden inside La Estrella, which is not a big seller to begin with.

The Star thus safely hidden from its prospective readership, the management inexplicably decided not to use the often quality content of La Estrella and make that available in English but run stories from the wire services instead that often had little or nothing to do with Panama.

Top that off with a snotty attitude towards phenomenons like weblogs and citizen journalism and the whole experiment became a recipe for disaster from the onset.

Or, as Al Giordano puts it, talking to the dying newspaper industry:

You lost the public to us because – there’s no nice or sugar-coated way to say it – you guys really suck at what you do. In your arrogance, you established calcified “rules” of “journalism” and false “objectivity” that neutered and spayed all of your reporters, domesticated so they would never again afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted. When you took the honest advocacy out of reporting you emptied it of all passion and reason to exist. It was a nice ride on your profit ledger sheet during the recent decades when you turned your rags into propaganda arms for the wealthy and powerful, but a funny thing happened on the way to the ATM machine: You lost the trust of your readers, half of whom have already given you the finger and pursued alternate routes to inform themselves of current events. And the rest are on the way through the same EXIT sign.

Hear hear! Next?