Dear Reader
The willingness to support a free and independent press on St. Maarten is apparently at an all time high presently. See the Caribisch Netwerk report "
Importance of independent media bigger than ever on St. Maarten" containing an interview with an emotional Hilbert Haar, former managing editor of the Today newspaper.
Many of our colleagues in the industry are today out of a job. Hilbert Haar and Terrance Rey have continued reporting the news online at
StMaartenNews.com. As a startup dotcom and e-commerce business we are passionate about what we are doing and why we are doing it. We want to continue to bring you independent news reporting written by free-spirited independent writers. To do that we need your financial support. We rather get that financial support in exchange for subscriptions and advertisements sold on our website and in our email newsletter.
When asked what we needed, we listed the following items: a laptop, a desktop computer, highspeed internet connection, a smartphone (with a good built-in camera for taking photos and making video recordings), a tablet for our whatsapp service and an external harddrive to backup our articles and photos.
In terms of manpower, we need a reporter, a good investigative journalist, a desk researcher, a graphics designer, a webdesigner and a webeditor. In order to afford all this, our aim is to sell as much subscriptions and ads as possible. That will be a great challenge in this present economy on St. Maarten.
Social and political commentary writer, Elton Jones, have a few choice words to say about the 'racist' cartoon Dutch MP Ronald van Raak paid for in The Daily Herald as a full page ad to support the 'Free Press' on St. Maarten in his column titled "
Interpreting the images we see" published online
here.
The
boulder they dropped on PM Marlin not only affects his position, but all of us as well. Nonetheless, we are able to make light of the situation with a little '
zelfspot', because we can laugh at ourselves and our local
politiicians. But it is a different story when someone else tries to make fun of us. We just consider it '
jokey'.
Anyway, we are grateful to all of you who have registered for a subscription plan with us. You can continue to do so online at
http://stmaartennews.com/registration. You can choose to pay immediately online with your creditcard or request to receive an invoice from us for manual payment.
Today is November 11th, St. Martin Day. We wish you a happy St. Martin Day. Stay strong, because we are #SXMSTRONG!
