Krásna Hôrka Castle destroyed by fire; the Catholic Church firing the archbishop of Trnava without explanation; Slovakia returning from the ice hockey world championship with a silver medal; and Fico’s new cabinet taking the reins: these are only some of the numerous stories that our readers found most popular on the spectator.sk website. Yet they illustrate the diversity of news The Slovak Spectator covered during 2012 for its many readers who do not speak Slovak and thus rely on a credible English-language news source. But The Slovak Spectator is no longer only for foreigners: the number of Slovak university and high-school students who are reading The Slovak Spectator thanks to our educational projects has been growing as well. Moreover, our Get Trained and Then Get Published programme, which provides practical training for journalism students in cooperation with Comenius University’s journalism school, won this year’s Via Bona prize for Socially Responsible Market Impact. This year we continued our Bringing the World to the Classroom project, organised with the help of diplomats who travel with us to different parts of Slovakia and discuss important issues such as tolerance, diversity or poverty with students. And thanks to the second annual event in our Best Media Tradition Project, which we organise in cooperation with Comenius University, Petit Academy Foundation and Tatra Banka Foundation, we were able to bring Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Tim Weiner to Slovakia to lecture at universities in Bratislava, Trnava and Ružomberok. We also launched, together with Sme TV, the Cooking with Ambassadors project to present international cuisine and culinary traditions. In these tough times for the media environment, also with the help of new projects, we are committed to living up to the expectations of our readers and fulfilling the important role of an independent and unbiased news source for society. Thank you for being our readers and supporters. We wish you a pleasant holiday season and much success in 2013. 

Ján Pallo