Go east, young journalist

by Roslyn Bernstein
Bernstein is the director of the journalism program at Baruch College, City University of New York.

It takes a brave person to visit the third-floor offices of The Prague Post, an English-language weekly at Na Porici 12, Praha 1, in the beautiful capital of the Czech Republic. Visitors have to test their athletic prowess by jumping off an elevator platform that refuses to stop. There is no time for hesitation.

The elevator may be a deterrent to some, but it has not scared off the staff, mostly American-born and -educated editors. They have happily fled their homeland for expatriate journalism in liberated central Europe. Given the frontier conditions that the elevator represents, the question is, why?

Martin Huckerby, the Post's British editor, has an answer: job satisfaction. "I read somewhere that job satisfaction in the States among journalists is way down," he says. "It's no surprise that many good people are coming here, not just because of the quality of life, but because they want to work in an exciting environment." The Prague Post, he says, provides "a seat on the balcony of Europe with a glass of Czech Pilsen in hand. There are wonderful stories here. The whole society is still in convulsions."

Founded in 1991 by a pair of young Americans, the Post has a circulation of some 14,000, with an estimated readership of 35,000, a figure that breaks down into 35 percent American and 29 percent Czech and Slovak, with the balance made up of tourists and an international audience. It's a young, educated readership, the paper's surveys show, and one willing to pay the hefty newsstand price of 30 crowns, or about $ 1.00.

Post editors are paid an average of $ 500 a month, peanuts in Western terms. Yet editor-in-chief Alan Levy says he regularly receives job applications from people earning $ 50,000 to $ 60,000 at such papers as The Atlanta Constitution and The Hartford Courant who are looking for new horizons. According to Levy, there are now sixteen similar English-language papers in Eastern Europe -- including three in Moscow, one in Tallinn, Estonia, and at least three in Budapest -- many attracting similar Western talent.

The Post's business editor, Dean Calbreath, a thirty-nine-year-old transplanted Californian, may be typical. He left the U.S. after seven years of writing about business, including a stint at the San Francisco Business Times. "The stories I was covering were respectable, but I was in a little bit of a rut," he says. "I was getting older and I had never lived abroad." Though he took an enormous pay cut, Calbreath insists that he has improved his standard of living greatly. "I'm living in a much better neighborhood than the one I lived in in San Francisco," he says.

Reporting in Prague, on the other hand, can be more difficult. "The infrastructure is terrible here," Calbreath says. "Telephones don't work, fax machines are slow, the mechanics of getting interviews is hard. And some segments are still suspicious of English-language newspapers."

Still, with so many deep changes to report and analyze, the work is rewarding. Business news is so important in Eastern Europe that the Post runs a special monthly section on banking and finance to supplement its weekly business coverage. Among the major stories Calbreath follows: the privatization of state-owned industries, the issue of restitution of property confiscated by the communists, and continuing problems of unemployment and bankruptcy.

Another expatriate American at The Prague Post is Melissa Morrison, a twenty-seven-year-old who left The Dallas Morning News, where she worked as a $ 25,000-a-year suburban news reporter, to become a regular free-lance feature writer at the Post, at greatly reduced pay. "The time to do it was now," she explains, "before I got too tied down."

Ky Krauthamer, thirty-five, left a design position at a literary book publisher in Portland, Oregon, and now finds himself editing restaurant and food reviews and columns for the Post. "Life is better and worse here," he says. "Worse because it can be frustrating to deal with the bureaucracy and hard to get an entry into Czech life that is not superficial. Better because it is more exciting and because Prague is a less predictable place to live in."

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