It didn't take very long to generate excitement. And on Oct. 1, 1991, The Prague Post hit the streets for the first time, becoming one of country's first independently owned and operated newspapers. The first 12-page issue offered a mixture of news, business and culture stories. There was also a pub guide.

"It had a sense of purpose," remembers Lisa Frankenberg, one of the paper's co-founders and, until recently, publisher. "I felt I built something that had an incredibly positive impact on the growth of the country."

Frankenberg first arrived in Czechoslovakia in 1990. She was 22 and had given herself a year to tool around Europe with a couple of college pals before flying home to start law school. Her plans drastically changed when she landed in the capital.

"Prague was absolutely beautiful. We were some of the first Americans here," says Frankenberg, now a 38-year-old mother of two, living in New York after almost a decade in Prague. "There was no neon. There was no McDonald's."

She and her friends decided what the city could really use was an English-language paper and quickly formed a monthly tabloid called Prognosis. The paper was a hit with the expat crowd, but newsstand vendors complained about having to keep it on display for a month at a time. Research also showed that businesses were looking for something geared more toward a general readership than a monthly alternative tabloid aimed at youthful readers.

Frankenberg says she knew Prognosis wouldn't survive if it didn't change, and wanted to turn it into a weekly. But the idea didn't fly with the others. Undeterred, Frankenberg and fellow Prognosis staffer Kent Hawryluk eventually split off and started writing a business plan for a new English-language weekly. (Prognosis went to a bi-monthly, then weekly format, but eventually folded.)

Together with Monroe Luther, a Texas-based investor who is now the Post's current publisher, Frankenberg and Hawryluk formed a business partnership over dinner in Vienna during the summer of 1991.

"I then told them that night ... that whatever we do, it should be legal and ... it should be what we felt was right in our heart so that we all slept well at night," Luther recalls. And, he added, "No matter what we do, we do it with class."

They leased a small, one-room office off Old Town Square and recruited seasoned journalist Alan Levy to come on as editor-in-chief. Not long after, the Post was hitting newsstands around the city.

"It looked Western. It gave a certain image. It was a success right from the start," Frankenberg says. "It's more than a business. It's a public service." A few months after its debut, the Post's editorial office moved into a larger space off Wenceslas Square and the paper increased to 16 pages. By the following year, editors introduced the public to the popular "Night & Day" entertainment section.

From the outset, notes Luther, "We set a goal of focusing on what was then Czechoslovakia, not the U.S. or U.K. That focus remains today."

In the beginning, local Czechs didn't know quite what to make of the newspaper. "It was very much part of the 'Americans in Prague' syndrome," notes Martin Huckerby, who was an editor at the Post from 1992 until 1996. "But as time passed, I think people realized it was a paper written by people from all over the world, including an increasing number of Czechs."

While the idea of being part of something historic thrilled the Post's original seven-member staff, reporters and editors quickly learned that publishing a weekly newspaper in a post-communist country wasn't an easy task.

"Facts were in short supply, cooperation from officialdom was usually minimal," Huckerby recalls. "In my first year or two, our reporters regularly tangled with top people who demanded to 'authorize' stories before we published anything about them."

And Frankenberg remembers how "people were willing to pay to kill a story or to have a story written. I think that was very common in the Czech press. Things in those early days took a lot of convincing because we maintained high ethical standards."

The Post developed an audience and was soon writing about some of the most important stories of the day. The breakup of Czechoslovakia; the aftermath of plutonium smuggling; the battle against discrimination; the downfall of President Václav Klaus; the Czech hockey team winning gold at the Nagano Olympics; and the floods of 2002 are just some of the major news events that graced the paper's front pages over the last 15 years.