The Prague Post - History

History

In July 1991, Lisa Frankenberg and Kent Hawryluk, two employees of Prognosis, an English-language monthly newspaper in Prague which began publication in March 1991, came to the realization that there was a ripe market in the then Czechoslovakia for a weekly broadsheet newspaper.

Together with Monroe Luther, an investor from Houston, Texas, they formed Lion’s Share Group, a privately held, Czech limited-liability company (spol s r.o.) that was created to be the information leader in the region. Kent Hawryluk served as Founding Publisher and Lisa Frankenberg as Founding General Manager. Other programs introduced at that time were the Business Network, Lion’s Share Group Publishing and the Prague Post Foundation (set up separately as a Czech-registered, non-profit foundation, and which later became The Prague Post Endowment Fund with the change in Czech nonprofit laws).

The mission of The Prague Post was simple and direct: to publish the best possible English-language newspaper for and about the rapidly changing Czechoslovakia and more broadly, Central Europe. The aim was to place particular emphasis on news, business, and cultural listings.

Alan Levy, a foreign correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and author of So Many Heroes, an eyewitness account of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, was hired as the Founding Editor-in-Chief. The original staff hired by Levy included former reporters and editors from a wide range of magazines and daily newspapers, including the Sacramento Bee, Sacramento Union, The New York Review of Books, Business International, the Grinnell Herald-Register, Fortune magazine and the Tampa Tribune.

Lion’s Share Group established the wholly owned subsidiary company Prague Post s.r.o. in March 1994 to take over the publishing of the newspaper, while Lion’s Share Group became a holding company. This structural change did not affect the daily operations of the newspaper and remains in place today.