Mi Panamá Transparente registrará incidentes de crimen y corrupción u produciirá un cambio en la forma de hacer periodismo y llevar la relación entre los periodistas y su comunidad.Panamá -- Mi Panama Transparente, una plataforma cartográfica en línea que registrará incidentes de crimen y corrupción con ayuda de los ciudadanos, es uno de los proyectos más importantes del ejercicio periodístico de este país y probablemente en toda América Latina.

Junto con colegas de La Estrella, el Panamá América y La Prensa, los diarios más importantes de Panamá, y TVN

Business stories can develop in unexpected, almost mysterious ways, I was reminded recently when the business desk at my host organization took a closer at soaring electricity prices in Serbia. Exploring the factors behind the price hikes showed that some of the long standing problems may not be so impossible to solve as people thought.

Serbia’s state-run power company Elektroprivreda Srbije, or EPS, has been a huge monopoly for decades, a remnant of the Communist era that has dodged several privatization attempts.

Belgrade-based Beta news agency launched a new web site this week, presenting its neatly integrated text, video, audio and photo production. www.beta.rs

The first private and independent news agency in Serbia, Beta, has been a great host organization. Its young and dedicated reporters continuously strive to beat the competition and provide superior service to the agency's more than 250 subscribers. Their efforts meant a better Web was needed to present Beta's diverse production.

One day this summer, on the island of Masbate, I watched a tricycle chug down the highway carrying 20 people. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I may not have believed it. Fortunately, my journalist colleague Rowena Paraan saw it, too, and she confirmed my count.

For my American friends: what people here call a tricycle is a small motorcycle with a covered sidecar. In Manila, tricycle drivers taxi people between neighborhoods; in the provinces, between towns and villages. Tricycles are ubiquitous in the Philippines.

I am an American journalist here in the Philippines to work on a ground-breaking media project involving the poorest of the poor. I’d like to tell you about it. But I’d be lying if I said I was here only as an altruist. I’m also here for selfish reasons: to experience life in the country where I was born.

We all know that politics makes for strange bedfellows, but what happened in Serbia this summer is amazing even by Balkan standards. The country’s long and winding road to democracy took a very strange turn with a new law regulating the media industry. Outlets now face steep fines and the only immediate winners are - lawyers.

I was expecting a city of shanties. A sprawling ghetto. A legion of beggars stumbling around a sagging town square. But I found none of these things in Dipolog City, the capital of Zamboanga del Norte, said to be the poorest province in the Philippines.

What I found instead during a recent visit to this city of 120,000 in western Mindanao was a prim, progressive place, full of bustle and ambition and a fair number of residents mystified by their province's number-one ranking on the poverty list.

"Yes we are poor but not that poor," I heard over and over again.

This past week I traveled to the geographic center of the Philippines, Masbate, one of the wildest and poorest places in this poor and unruly nation. I met with widows of murder victims, with fish-less fisherfolk and destitute gold miners. I met with a governor who, though nice enough, seemed to take pride in being clueless. “I’m not even from Masbate,” said Governor Elisa Kho. “I’m from Marikina!”

Sad, rugged, dusty place, Masbate. But a handful of individuals there gave me hope for the province, the country. They inspired me. All were journalists.