These are moments to celebrate, EL PILÓN reaches its 29 years of creation, on the verge of completing three decades writing, recording and disseminating the daily events of Valledupar, Cesar, La Guajira and other regional environments, without leaving aside the country and the international sphere.
These dates allow us to rejoice, remember and share with joy many achievements, successes and good intentions, but it is also the occasion in which we evoke sad and painful episodes such as the one that occurred with the renowned journalist Guzmán Quintero Torres, who was vilely murdered while serving as our editor-in-chief in 1999. We also remember the journalist Damaris Quiroz, who died in a traffic accident and who was part of the EL PILÓN journalistic team.
We have the duty to praise these 29 years of helping to build the history of this important region of Colombia and of having managed to gain the trust and acceptance of our readers and all our audiences, thanks to that level of welcome from the people in the Currently we are the greatest journalistic reference in Valledupar before Colombia and the world.
All of this constitutes an enormous commitment to continue facing various challenges and many challenges that must be assumed with the same editorial line that day after day, year after year has characterized EL PILÓN: a serious and independent media, always at the service of good collective causes and everything that contributes to the development of our society.
As we review in our news pages, we reiterate that there are many challenges that EL PILÓN has had throughout these 29 years: at the beginning, transforming from a graphic arts company to becoming a printed newspaper after the release of the Diario Vallenato, that was an important effort that allowed it to consolidate itself in the minds, in the eyes and in the audience of the region, we must highlight that at the beginning it had some products that we do not have today, such as EL PILÓN GUAJIRO and a newspaper of popular court called AY OMBE, economic difficulties put an end to those two projects.
Precisely, that was another of the challenges faced, that of the economic crisis, which forced the newspaper to take advantage of Law 550, something fortunately now overcome. The death of our editor-in-chief affected for a certain time the free exercise of journalism, as well as the incidence of the armed conflict under the actions of the different armed groups outside the law, despite this EL PILÓN always preserved its character of an independent media, thus avoiding the risk of falling into self-censorship.
At this time we continue to face many new challenges: we are facing a monster called the internet and digitalization, we have been able to avoid that and move forward, to the point that EL PILÓN has an important participation on its website and on social networks, managing to become in the most followed and most respected medium.
Another challenge is the strong competition that we have in terms of advertising against digital media. However, although it has not achieved great economic sustainability, it has managed to maintain itself thanks to 90 percent of private business support in guidelines, in addition to our own initiatives aimed at channeling resources.
Today we have every reason to give a thousand thanks to the entire Pilonera family, especially our readers, audiences and advertisers.