The original mission of the Amigoe, one of the oldest Caribbean newspapers, has never really changed since it started out as a weekly published by the Diocese of Curaçao in January, 1884. The Catholic Dominican Friars would happily go the extra mile to annoy or cross the Dutch Protestant Colonial Administration in every way they could, but their most important task was to monitor and write about every move the colonial rulers made. According to Michael Voges, Managing Director, that is still the core business of the Amigoe newspaper. “A newspaper needs to be a watchdog, needs to be critical. It is our duty to get the answers to questions everybody has, but no one dares to ask.”
More than a Newspaper
Originally a weekly, the Amigoe became a daily newspaper issued by the Catholic Church in 1941, and about 36 years ago, the Catholic journal was bought by a group of seven people. It became an independent, daily, afternoon newspaper taken over by the Voges family in 2005. The Publishing Company Amigoe, Inc. has its own printing office. Besides the newspaper Amigoe that is distributed in Curaçao and Bonaire, it also publishes Ñapa, the weekend supplement, the Amigoe Express, a tabloid in English with weekly reviews, local and international news and an entertainment calendar, the Amigoe Aruba and the Amigoe at School for the students of Colegia Arubano [a high school on Aruba]. With a total of 185 part time and full time employees on Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba, the Amigoe is a reasonably big employer.
Challenging Times
Being a newspaper in the digital and social media era is not easy. Lots of newspapers all over the world are struggling, and the Amigoe is no exception. Theft in the broadest sense seems to be one of the biggest challenges; radio stations reading Amigoe articles out loud, companies spreading the PDF-file of the paper and all kinds of collections of cuttings on the internet. If potential subscribers can read the articles for free, they won’t be willing to pay or subscribe. The irony of this kind of piracy is that it clearly demonstrates the widely appreciated quality of the Amigoe throughout the Caribbean. But quality comes with a price, so to make it harder to access, the publisher changed its website, the format, and adjusted the firewall. According to Managing Director Voges, another challenge in regard to social media is the double standard that people apply. Everyone can say or write anything on Facebook or on their blogs, and once it is written, it suddenly seems to become the truth. A newspaper simply cannot. It isn’t allowed to do so and should not, for that matter. While Facebook isn’t held responsible or accountable for the things people write on their pages, the newspaper is. Therefore, Amigoe checks and double checks and does research before publishing their news. This also means they won’t just publish press releases to fill the newspaper. “A press release only communicates what the people in charge want you to know, that doesn’t necessarily mean it tells you what you should know,” clarifies Michael Voges. So the reporters of the Amigoe ask, investigate, inquire, explore, and verify first.By delivering high quality news through research, the newspaper wants to distinguish itself from other newspapers in the region. But this strategy to avoid the mere editing of press releases and just publishing everything is not without sacrifices or consequences. As a result, the Amigoe has had to downsize the paper to twenty or sixteen pages. In the opinion of the publisher, the majority of people, boards, shareholders and stakeholders underestimate the pressure on production and the time it takes to do research. “If one copies and pastes, it is easy to produce six articles in less than an hour,” he explains. “It is really not that difficult to just fill the pages, but if you want to produce a high quality newspaper, you need to give your staff time to investigate, and this will influence production”. In short, the Amigoe chose quality over mass production and quantity, even if that meant reducing the pages of their journal and even if they might have given their readers the impression things were not going so well.
“A press release only communicates what the people in charge want you to know, that doesn’t necessarily mean it tells you what you should know”
Bring it on
Last, but not least, the Managing Director worries over the latest trend of passivity, if not to say the indifference, of the societies on the Caribbean islands and the lack of accountability. At times, it makes the tone of the newspaper sarcastic, because what is the use of being a watchdog if hardly anybody seems to really care? Political developments, non-transparent and obscure decision-making, arbitrariness in enforcing the law, the Amigoe denounces it, but the community remains silent and apparently indifferent. He wonders why people do not blame the media for not doing their job and why people do not complain about politicians who are not acting ethically. But when the Amigoe exposes things and asks, for instance, how Curaçao was sold to the Chinese for the coming forty years, or what is going to happen with the 33 million guilders of state support for the airline company, or how that support is even possible considering the damning indictment of 2016 and the absence of annual accounts, the same people tell the paper to shut up because they are being too negative, and the island needs to make progress. According to the newspaper boss, it is the general lack of responsibility, the culture of naming and shaming others, the almost seemingly apathetic state of mind that needs to change. In his opinion, politicians are just a reflection of our society. “Sure we can blame them for everything that is going wrong, that’s so easy to do, but if we don’t really care, if we, the people, don’t act upon any wrongdoings or right ones, if we, as a community, don’t take any responsibility, why should they?”