There was something both exciting and
frightening about laying out the front page of a newspaper and
somewhere under the masthead, typing the words: Volume One,
Number One.
Exciting, because getting the first edition
to the presses is a lot of hard work over long hours, through
trial and error (often more of the latter than the former),
before the baby finally surfaces. And frightening, because,
regrettably, it’s not good enough to do it just once.
In popular newspaper parlance, you’re only as good as
your last story, and good, bad or indifferent, you have to get
up and do it all again.
So, welcome to The Beach
Times. In print and online.
As that masthead says,
Your Weekly Newspaper on the Gold Coast.
Who are
we?
Well, journalists. All our working lives.
Ralph Nicholson
is as Australian as cricket matches, Holden cars
and meat pies on Bondi Beach. He began as an
afternoon newspaperman before moving to Reuters
Television. He’s been bureau chief in Jerusalem
although still can’t explain precisely what the
problem is. He covered the US Presidential
election campaign in 1988, but given it was
between Bush The First and Michael Dukakis, left
shortly after. And he opened the company’s first
television bureau in Moscow, when Mikael Gorbachev
was a vaguely interesting man, no one had ever
heard of Glasnost or Perestroika, and The Cold War
was at its height. He saw The Berlin Wall come
down in November 1989 and three weeks later,
Alexander Dubcek return to Wenceslas Square for
Prague’s velvet revolution. After all that he had
a brief spell in Rome. It is possible he will
never see another live cricket match --- either in
the flesh or on television.
Zoraida Diaz is
a Colombian-born photojournalist who began with
the international news agency, Reuters, in 1987
and since then has photographed hundreds of news,
sports, and documentary stories in almost every
country in the Americas. That hasn’t always been
the easiest of assignments. While she saw the
Pope’s historic visit to Cuba, covered World Cup
Soccer in France, followed Hillary Clinton to
North Africa and watched Che Guevara’s remains
return to Santiago de Cuba, she also spent four
years as chief photographer in Bogota when Pablo
Escobar was considerably more powerful than the
then President. Heavily armed military, a child in
tears and dead bodies were more the subject matter
----- often all in the same
picture.
Together,
we are the editorial team of The Beach Times.
In
starting the paper in March of 2004, we believed Guanacaste’s
Pacific Coast had grown to the point it needed its own, English
language, weekly newspaper. One that fairly and accurately,
reports the issues that affect you. Written here, by people
who live here. Serious as the need warrants, ever so
occasionally, funny, hopefully never dull.
It is
advertising-supported (we have to try to pay for it somehow),
but not driven by advertising. We encourage debate and there’s
a forum for your letters, with all the usual caveats. We don’t
write editorials, unless of course The Editor gets really
upset. We want to cater for kids, and families, and try to
foster a sense of community. We will, of course, make
mistakes. Sometimes we will apologize.
