What’s this about the Stabroek News website?

Dear Editor,

I am writing with reference to a letter writer in the Stabroek News who is claiming that the newspaper has a far reach because they have a website. I really don’t understand some people, all three of our daily newspapers have a websites the Kaieteur News and the Guyana Chronicle. In fact, the Chronicle’s website is updated at midnight every day. So this thing where persons are trying to find ways to show how the Stabroek News is reaching across the country is nonsense.

The Stabroek News need to accept that the paper’s figure of circulation is low. Guyanese have realised that the newspaper in most of its reports, has a clear agenda. I guess that when they start to report in a balanced, clear and accurate manner, persons will buy the newspaper and their circulation may match that of Chronicle and Kaieteur News.

Yours faithfully,

Leila Ram

Editor’s note

Ms Ram is surprisingly ill-informed. The letter writer she is apparently referring to published an official table from the internet showing that the number of visitors to our website is far higher than in the case of the Chronicle and Kaieteur News. The statistics report for our online website for the month of December 2006 indicated that the average number of visitors per day for that month including Guyana were 46,507 (the average hits per day were 2,994,562).

On a business basis neither the Chronicle nor the Mirror should receive a sizeable share of government advertisements. Moreover, the Stabroek News is the newspaper of record in Guyana and has the ideal target audience for the kind of advertisements placed by ministries and state corporations. Any responsible advertising agency would take that into account. On the basis of a business decision the Stabroek News should receive a substantial share of government advertisements.

The recent fiasco with the withdrawal of ads by the Guyana Sugar Corporation and the Guyana Power and Light made the position even more clear. In these cases, a known political functionary intervened directly bypassing top management and the boards of directors and gave `instructions’ that the ads be withdrawn.”