By Stanley Seakor, Managing Editor/Publisher
When a small band of us gathered in the closing days of August 1998 to prepare the first edition of THE ANALYST, we did not know whether the paper would see its first birthday, let alone its twenty-eighth. We knew only what we wanted it to be. Liberia had newspapers enough that reported the day’s events; what it lacked was a paper that paused to explain what those events meant, that went behind the headline to the issue, and that measured every story against the rule of law rather than the mood of the palace. That was the paper we dared to build, and we built it in the teeth of a climate that guaranteed us enemies.
I will not pretend those early years were anything but frightening. We launched into the presidency of a former warlord, into a season of fresh insurgency and official suspicion, and our very first front page set us at odds with the powerful. What followed tested every conviction we held. Our printers were warned against us; our advertisers were pressured to abandon us. Our equipment was seized, our staff were detained, and colleagues of mine spent nights in cells for the crime of practicing honest journalism. There were seasons when the paper appeared only once a week, and seasons when it barely appeared at all. By 2001 I did not know whether THE ANALYST would survive the year.
That it did survive is not a story of my doing. It is a story of the people who refused to let it die. I think of the writers and reporters who filed under threat, of the production and business staff who found a way to put the paper on the street when there was no money for newsprint, of the correspondents in the counties who widened our eyes to the whole nation. I think of those who are no longer with us, whose names this edition honors, and whose labor is woven into every page we still print. And I think of our readers — the vendors, the students, the market women, the teachers, the Liberians at home and in the diaspora — whose few coins and steady loyalty were, more than once, the difference between our survival and our silence.
We were sustained by a simple creed, which I hold as firmly today as I did in 1998. We set out to be an ally of those who strive for a better Liberia, and a faithful guardian of the Fourth Estate in a fragile republic.
We believed then, and believe now, in a three-way flow of information: that government must hear the people, that the people must hear the government, and that a free and analytical press is the channel through which both come to decide more wisely. We chose analysis over applause, and we paid for the choice. I regret none of it.
The Liberia that greets our twenty-eighth anniversary is not the Liberia of our founding. The guns have long fallen silent. Power has changed hands in peace, conducted by Liberians themselves without foreign supervision.
Freedoms that once existed only as our demand — access to public information, the decriminalization of speech — now exist in law. These are gains worth guarding, and it has been the quiet privilege of my life to have helped chronicle the country’s journey from that darkness toward this uncertain light.
If there is one lesson I have drawn across these twenty-eight years, it is that a newspaper does not belong to those who found it. It belongs to the public it serves, and it endures only so long as it keeps faith with them.
That is why I take such pride in seeing THE ANALYST pass into the hands of a new generation of editors and writers, several of whom cut their teeth in our founding newsroom. The mission that drove us is safe with them. The standard we set — accuracy, balance, courage, and an unbroken independence from every faction and every incumbency — is theirs now to uphold and to raise. I could ask no finer inheritance for this paper, nor entrust it to hands I trust more to keep the faith.
To our staff past and present, to our partners and advertisers, and above all to our readers: thank you for twenty-eight years of trust. We were bruised in the making, but we were never broken, and we do not intend to be. Long may THE ANALYST stand, and long may it serve the country that gave it life.
— Stanley Seakor, Founding Managing Editor & Chief Executive Officer