Inside Prague’s 1990s English-language media boom: Mark Baker on the expat press era
Alongside the general explosion of freedom in 1990s Prague, there was also a boom in English-language newspapers and magazines in the city. The short-lived age of titles such as Prognosis, The Prague Post, Think and many others is the subject of a recent series of blog posts by travel writer Mark Baker. I spoke to Baker, who at one point was business editor at The Prague Post, at our studios.
You’ve written a three-part series of blog posts about the history of English-language print media here in the 1990s. What led you to take on this whole project?
“One reason is that there is a highly interested community of people who lived through those times, and I knew that the blog posts would be read and appreciated and understood.
“But I had a bigger purpose. Nineties print media was pre-internet and on paper, and that community, that ecosystem, is dying.
“It’s very hard to find any information about these publications on the internet.
“Think about it – we didn’t have cameras on our phones, so we didn’t take photos of everything. You wouldn’t necessarily take a photo with your camera of the cover of a magazine. So there aren’t even the covers.
“So that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to put these publications on the record, on the web, in AI, whatever, so that when people Google something in the future at least something of this community comes back.”
I guess if we look at the overall landscape, there were two titles that towered above all the others, Prognosis and The Prague Post?
“Right. These two were the first English-language publications to emerge in this decade of the 1990s.
“Prognosis actually came first, in March of 1991, and The Prague Post came in October 1991, so seven months later.
“But the interesting thing that happened was that The Prague Post actually came out of Prognosis, in the sense that the founders of The Prague Post, Lisa Frankenberg and Kent Hawryluk, started out there; that’s why they came to Prague, and that’s how they got interested in newspapers.”
And you say that The Prague Post was seen as the kind of establishment publication and Prognosis was regarded as being more punky?
“Right. You can’t imagine all the hurt feelings on all sides. Believe me, all this stuff happened 30 years ago, but you can still very easily wander into the territory of hurt feelings.
“Prognosis would say that Lisa and Kent defected. They would say that they left to start their own paper, which, either way, is a point of view, I suppose.
“And those bad feelings lingered for a long time afterward and actually cleaved the expat community for many years – you were either Prognosis or you were Prague Post.”
There are so many titles I had largely forgotten about, from The New Presence to Velvet. Beyond the big two newspapers, which titles for you were the most notable?
“There were, I would say, a handful of publications that broke out.
“I would put the Prague Post in that basket, because at one point they achieved a circulation of 40,000, and they were seen as the regional English-language standard-bearer, for better or worse.
“But there were a couple of other really notable publications. One was Trafika, a literary journal that came out in 1993.
“Trafika somehow caught the attention of international taste-makers, all around the literary world and – for a very brief period, it didn’t last long in the limelight – rose to be one of the world’s premier literary publications, I would say.
“The other one would be Prague Business Journal, PBJ. We can talk about publications that actually broke into the Czech market and made a difference here, and I think PBJ was one of them.
“They had great reporters. They covered things that sometimes the local press wasn’t willing to cover, like all the corruption scandals in the government, and they broke stories.”
You looked back at a lot of these publications. In terms of the writing and the content, how do they stand up from today’s perspective?
“I think the writing is pretty good. It’s lively, people are really engaged. There’s an obvious target market, and knowing your reader is key to good writing.
“Many of these publications were writing to serve the needs of foreigners who couldn’t speak the language and needed to know how to navigate the city at the time.
“I’m not a literary critic or anything like that, so I can’t judge all the poems and fiction that came out, but you have to give them some credit for trying back then. They really tried.”
Few of them lasted long, so maybe it’s easy in hindsight to say they had a bad business plan, or they hadn’t thought it through. But still, is it fair to say that there was maybe more enthusiasm than business sense behind these publications?
“Yes, absolutely. The serious newspapers and the business journals really were out to make a profit. They had identified a paying market of advertisers and readers and they wanted to capture that market.
“All of the rest of the publications were kind of inventions. There was no real demand for Velvet or Optimism or literary journals – people weren’t craving these things, or even needing them.
“But there was that creative aspect of the expat community that needed to find some kind of outlet. And that’s the role these publications really served – as an outlet for this voice.
“That’s why I think perhaps the creative publications, the literary journals, are some of the most interesting things that came out of the expat community back then.”
And was it the case that maybe they had backers who weren’t necessarily looking for a profit but were enthused about the changes in the region?
“There was something in the air. Obviously there weren’t iron-clad business plans that were going to turn a profit in one or two years, or something like that.
“It was really to capture the moment in word, in written word.”
Obviously it’s a long time now since the glory days of the ‘90s. But is it possible to speak about any kind of legacy of these English-language publications?
“I think that these publications – the newspapers, the literary journals, the poetry journals and all that stuff – were kind of like the expat counterpart to what was going on in Czech society at the time.
“It was very similar. They mirror each other in many ways.
“So I think they were both responding to the same impetus, the same sense of freedom, or whatever it was that was happening back then that made people feel like they had to express themselves.”
And some of the people involved went on to have great careers?
“I think that’s the legacy that really needs to be told that isn’t.
“If you look at the masthead of Prognosis, The Prague Post, Prague Business Journal, these journalists have gone on to incredibly successful careers, in the US, the UK, here in Prague – wherever their home has been.
“It’s amazing. You pick up a newspaper today, or look at something online, and you see the byline and it’s somebody who cut their teeth in journalism right here in Prague, in the ‘90s.”
Read also: The battles of '90s newspapers and news journals
PART 1: THE LOST WORLD OF PRAGUE’S EXPAT PRESS