Gringo Gazettes
(Page 3 of 4)
“First you have a guy with a pick staking his claim on a plot of land,” Nicholson said. “A few more prospectors arrive, and a few more, and next thing you know there’s a land grab. Everyone needs supplies to build on their land, so up goes a general store. People start bringing in their families, and they need places to eat, so restaurants start popping up. You need telecommunications – electricity and phone lines are put in, which happened here less than twenty years ago.
“And then people want a newspaper.”
A career journalist and former Reuters executive, Nicholson, 50, from Australia, landed in Guanacaste in January 2004, and found himself sitting in a beachside restaurant, looking out at the ocean, beer in hand, wishing he had something informative to read that would tell him what was really going on in that part of the country. Three months later, he and his wife, former Reuters photographer Zoraida Díaz, from Colombia, published the first issue of The Beach Times, with a print run of 3,000 copies, which they distributed themselves in beach towns throughout Guanacaste.
After three years of “bloody hard work,” Nicholson now prints 10,000 copies weekly and distributes throughout Guanacaste and south to the central Pacific coast, home to the popular tourist destinations of Jacó and Manuel Antonio. Currently running forty pages, the free publication features original regional and community news reports written by an editorial staff of five.
Nicholson says his paper’s goal is to inform people about what’s really happening in coastal communities on a local level.
“I think the community newspaper, like local government, is the most important thing here,” he said. “Ours is not a paper about foreigners for foreigners. It’s designed to educate people who have chosen to live in this region. It’s not always pleasant reading for investors.”
The Tamarindo News, a free, monthly publication based in the tourist mecca of Tamarindo, takes a lighter approach.
“We’re not too heavy or serious of a newspaper,” said editor and publisher Juanita Hayman, 36. “People on vacation are trying to get away from all the terrible things happening in their own countries.”
The first English-language paper based in Guanacaste, The Tamarindo News began in May 2003 as a joint venture between Hayman and Nicholas Viale, owner of the Century 21 real estate franchise in Tamarindo. Hayman, a seven-year resident of Tamarindo, said she saw the need for a local paper, and her then-future husband Viale – the two were married last year – wanted a place to advertise.
After starting with twelve pages, the paper doubled in size in just three months.
“That’s when I started freaking out and thinking, ‘Whoa, this is going to be a full-time job,’” Hayman recalled.
Today The Tamarindo News runs about thirty-six pages – more during the tourist high season – and prints 3,000 copies monthly, with a staff consisting of an English-language editor, a Spanish-language editor, and freelancers. Covering local issues and some newswire-provided national and international news, the bilingual publication runs stories in English with Spanish translations alongside. Hayman says the paper’s objective is to “serve as a community platform where residents can voice their concerns and have a place to talk about the things that are important. It’s also an information tool for people who live here and come to visit.”
Targeting a different market is The Journal, based out of Liberia. Formerly The Guanacaste Journal, the weekly started as an English-language section of Guanacaste’s Spanish-language El Independiente, according to the newspaper’s general manager, Jan Kozak, from the Czech Republic.
Thanks to the financial backing of its investors, who Kozak says are developers behind some of the biggest projects in Guanacaste, The Journal has been able to grow quickly since its inception in January 2005. Distributed along the Pacific coast and in San José, the free-circulation paper currently runs between forty-eight and fifty-six pages and prints 20,000 copies a week.