Full Speed Ahead

By Barton Biggs
The cambodia daily

Matthew Roberts/The Cambodia Daily Robin McDowell (left), Barton Biggs (center) and Bernard Krisher (right) agonize over early issues of the Daily at the Renakse Hotel.

It was mid-August 1993, just days before the announced launch date of The Cambodia Daily, and I was convinced that the still-embryonic project was heading for disaster.

I made a last ditch effort to convince publisher Bernie Krisher that we had to scale back our ambitions, starting out with two or three issues per week rather than the five we had planned.

Robin McDowell, the managing editor, and I had only been in the country for a few weeks. None of the team of four or five Cambodian reporters we had hired had any journalism experience, and their English was halting at best (while our Khmer was nonexistent).

We had put together a few mock-up issues, each of which had taken days to complete. The idea that we would be setting out to publish a newspaper in Phnom Penh every business day, week in and week out, seemed to me, quite simply, absurd. I told Bernie as much. He disagreed.

Ten years later, The Cambodia Daily staff has never failed to put out an issue. When I left Cambodia after a three-year tenure as editor-in-chief of the Daily, that consistency was, perhaps, what I was most proud of.

We had faced myriad obstacles. The editorial staff was inexperienced, from top to bottom. There was hostility from the expatriate community, then, later, from the government. There were threats and break-ins, there were shots fired at our staff.
There were too many power outages and computer crashes to count.

We hired one young man whose sole job was to see to it that our generator didn’t run out of petrol—he had the unfortunate habit of falling asleep.

I could go on and on—but this is the Daily, so I’ll get to the point.
In truth, with some of the early issues, the fact that we managed to get them out on the streets by morning was about all there was to be proud of.

But even later, after the paper had established itself as a journalistic force, I still took satisfaction in the Daily’s regularity.
It represented a kind of toughness, a durability, a determination to counter the rumor mill with facts—immediately.
It proved what many, myself included, had doubted: That a responsible daily newspaper could be published in those early years of post-Untac Cambodia.

I believe the country is better for it.