Two of my closest friends Heather Faulkner and Ginger Sendalova left Vancouver in the late 90s, jumping into the void that was post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Both had secured positions at the romantic sounding Prague Post.
After moving to London in 1999, and thanks to cheap flights by the now-defunct Go, I probably visited them a dozen times in two years, spending hours and hours in the Post‘s offices. It looked like every student newspaper office that I have every visited, and probably ran on the same budget, but the Post always punched far above its weight in news, photography and design, outclassing even the International Herald Tribune and The European.
But my friends were working for the winner in a newspaper war over the hearts and minds of a generation of Western 20-whatevers who had come seeking what Post editor-in-chief Alan Levy called “the Left Bank of the ’90s.”
“For some of us, Prague is Second Chance City; for others a new frontier where anything goes, everything goes, and, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is nebulous, and who knows about tomorrow, but, somewhere within each of us, we all know that we are living in a historic place at a historic time.“—The Prague Post, October 1, 1991 (first issue)
Here, Jacques Poitras, talks about the paper that lost, Prognosis and what might have been.
“These American kids start the first English-language newspaper. … It can’t help but thrive, right?” Welch’s friend, Ken Layne, told me in an e-mail in 1995. “It sputters along for several years, getting a million dollars in free press, no business plan, no financial plan, no discipline, just bumbling along, just like all of Prague is doing. And just like the fucking Communists, Prognosis is living off subsidies,” a reference to the money from relatives and foundations in the United States. “Meanwhile, the Czechs figure it all out. They toss away a lifetime of anti-capitalist bullshit and turn Prague into a fucking money machine. Everybody figures out how to run a business, how to make cash, how to succeed — everybody but these American kids who refuse to even acknowledge the need for money, for success.
“If [Post publisher] Lisa Frankenberg is your villain,” Layne added, “you’ve bought into the biggest piece of fabricated history ever. If they had figured out how to use Lisa’s smarts … Prognosis would be a thriving media empire today instead of a dead newspaper fondly remembered by fifty people. The results speak for themselves. Lisa is no monster. A hundred other people have felt the same way about the half-ass manner in which Prognosis was run.”
— Prague Reverb: Revisiting an American Newspaper War Abroad