Well then, you have heard the moderators' reports of what we learned from the conference that could be used to help the journalists of Eastern and Central Europe. I want to point to just two initiatives that I found interesting. One was Sweden's newspaper subsidy program; the other its ombudsman's office. Notwithstanding some delegates' distaste -- scorn, even -- for these initiatives, they might well be of interest to journalists in the new democracies. It is true, they may be at odds with one's ethos of news media, but to denounce them as worthless and worse strikes me as dogmatic. A Finnish delegate said: "The better the journalists perform their tasks, the better for the people and the entire society." That strikes me as a clear understanding of the importance for freedom of the press and democracy of helping journalists do a good job. If the Scandinavians find that initiatives like state subsidies for struggling newspapers and the institution of ombudsman to represent the public's interest in newspapers help journalists do their jobs better, we should surely welcome them. Hodding Carter makes the point that his country's wonderfully muscular First Amendment was enacted at a time when the American press was in many ways disreputable. Enacting it was enlightened, to be sure. But Mr. Carter knows better than I can ever know the way things change, and that what served the Americans 200 years ago may not work in other countries today. "We boil at different degrees," Shakespeare said. Prof. Michael Cobden University of King's College Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada CSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 38