I was sitting at one of The Prague Post's two computers sometime in 1992 when the desk suddenly exploded with light. "Act naturally," ordered a booming voice behind me. "Sure," I thought. My natural reaction to someone blasting me with a million watts is to cover my eyes and shout, "It wasn't me, officer."

Of course, I carried on working, or at least pretended to. It was the TV news, and they had come to do The Story. Again.

It was a few months after I arrived at the Post, and the parade of high-profile newspapers and television stations through our offices at the Communist Party building was a regular event. Most of us had, or at least feigned, a certain degree of contempt for these Western invaders and their bright lights. We knew they had The Story all worked out before they left New York City. Sing along if you know the words: "Young Americans (only Americans) are fleeing the early '90s recession to reinvent themselves in the land of Kafka and write the Great Novel of Our Times" Anything that didn't follow the story line was left on the cutting-room floor, so we often just gave up and told them what they wanted to hear.

But I think these visits bugged us for another reason. Something special was happening, but it defied those attempts to give it a simple label. There was a feeling that it might not survive under a bright light.

My first year in Prague passed like one of those dreamy white mists that roll out sometimes in the fall. The Czech(oslovaks) were still buzzing with the energy of revolution and change. The foreigners were like a totally different plant appearing in your window box one day. The foreigners (not just Americans, by the way) felt the tingle of watching history unfold from the front row. I can understand why people expected great works to emerge from it all.

Everybody had a story. I had arrived with $200 and the clothes I was wearing after losing the rest in a robbery in a place called Nice. In a just couple of months, I had found a job, a flat, a girlfriend and a crowd to run with. People were starting up clubs and theater companies and newspapers on a wing and a prayer. The Prague Post, founded by a couple of 23-year-olds who roped in a Texas investor on Charles Bridge, was just that sort of story.

The engine behind it all was Change. I remember a place called The 100 Club, a makeshift bar someone had thrown together on Wenceslas Square with a boom box, a couple of crates of beer and some colored lights. It had that name because the proprietors only had the lease for 100 days, then the entire building would be gutted. Impermanence was the nature of things, with shops, bars and people changing like the lemons and cherries on a slot machine.

At least 10 other English-language papers arose, shook their fist at us and faded. Sometimes keeping The Prague Post going was like doing your ironing in a hurricane. Some weeks, three editors, two writers and a translator would just up and leave. But, just as quickly, new, fresh faces would wander in, wanting to take part.

The paper gave me a great seat from which to watch expat Prague march by. It was almost like newcomers felt they had to check in with us like an immigration office, asking if we had any work. The rule was simple: Go out and try to write something. If you come back with something we can use, you're in. That's usually all it took to sort out the "just visiting" crowd from the people who really wanted to cover the story.

I realize I haven't said a lot about journalism. One story line that didn't interest the networks was that some very serious and committed journalists had crossed the divide to the East to know the unknown. From our under-resourced perch we watched a country fast-forward from an enforced 1950s to something closer to the present day, and tried to put some of it into words. We did it with a couple of telephones, two computers and some enthusiastic Czech kids to translate. Sometimes as many as three people were actually living in the offices on Politických věznů, shaving in the coed bathroom, borrowing the office tie and going to interview a minister.

Change is a mixed bag, and accelerated change doubly so. I look at the city today and remember how the frescoes and sundials and delicate, sculpted faces had to be excavated from beneath layers of coal dust and grime. The shops have snappier names than "bread" and "drink" and "meat." Beautiful Baroque courtyards are no longer filled with rusting junk. But a lot that was quiet and understated and simple has been lost.

With progress marched in the rules and the pragmatists. The buskers and young people lost their fleeting occupation of Charles Bridge and Obecní dům as faded glory was replaced by the polished-up tourist trap. Václav Havel's idea of a country with its own morals and ethics was soon dismissed as hippie dreaming, and the bottom line became the real moral to the story.

When I got here, most of the Czechs I knew were marvelously unpolluted by the consumer-driven electronic-entertainment culture. There was ballroom dancing, campouts, singing by the fire and pubs without televisions where real storytellers competed for the table's attention. Goodbye to much of that.

Did we contribute to the good or the bad? I don't think a foreigner can really answer that. From the metronome sculpture atop Letná Park, the city looks much as it did in 1740, shrugging off the Young Americans in Prague thing like so many other movements and isms. I hope we contributed our bit to the marketplace of ideas, and maybe gave the Czechs a glimpse into the way others see them. The rest is history.

The author worked at The Prague Post from 1992 to 1999, was news