About the Crete Gazette

History of the Crete Gazette

Crete Gazette was the idea of Lou Duro, an experienced journalist from USA, who has been living in Crete for more than 20 years now. Crete Gazette was published online for the first time on January 2005 as part of the ExploreCrete.com website. Later, on September 2005 the Crete Gazette.com website was launched. On December 2005 Lou Duro decided to retire and Yannis Samatas of ExploreCrete.com bought the share of Lou Duro and became the exclusive publisher of the newspaper.

Is Crete Gazette in print?

Crete Gazette is published online every 2 months and it reaches a constantly growing international audience. Crete Gazette is also custom-printed for various sponsors in Crete and they distribute it in their areas.

What is the purpose of the Crete Gazette?

To inform about the everyday events in Crete, to educate those who wish to learn more about Crete and to entertain its readers each month.

Is there room for more people in your team?

Sure there is. What we want to achieve with Crete Gazette is to give the opportunity to as many people as possible to join us and help us maintain and improve the “English-speaking Voice of Crete”.

Crete is not only its beautiful landscapes or its history, but most of all, it is its people. The people who know Crete and love it for its special beauty and energy. It doesn’t matter if these people live in Crete or dream of living here soon. If there is love and the wish to talk about it, then you are most welcome to join us. None of us is a professional publisher, editor or journalist but we all share the same enthusiasm and devotion.

Do you offer a fee for columnists?

Not at the moment. Crete Gazette is at its first steps and it cannot afford to pay writers. All people in our team are volunteers. If, however, we have a profit from this project, then we will share that with the people who work with us.

What is the relationship of Crete Gazette with the ExploreCrete.com website?

ExploreCrete.com is the mother site of CreteGazette.com. Both sites are owned and updated by the same man, Yannis Samatas. Yannis created ExploreCrete.com many years ago (1998) and he has been updating and improving it ever since.

Recently he decided to get involved in the project of a newspaper for Crete, because he felt that the Internet was not enough for what he wanted to achieve. What he has been trying to achieve all these years is to create an active community of friends of Crete, people who have in common their love for Crete. The first steps have been done with ExploreCrete.com, which has managed to become one of the reference websites about Crete There are people supporting the site with articles, photographs, translations and active presence in the site’s lively forum.

ExploreCrete in the last years has become more of an online magazine about Crete than a travel site. Crete Gazette is the way to distribute its monthly content to more people with or without internet access. Furthermore Crete Gazette includes also news about Crete and hopefully, it will become a bridge between the native and the foreign community of Crete. Yannis hopes to see ExploreCrete and Crete Gazette becoming the meeting place and the voice of all friends of Crete, local and international.

ExploreCrete and Crete Gazette do not have clear borderlines because there is no need for such. They co-operate closely and they use common sub-sections like the Forums, Mailing List and the Classified ads. The development of separate systems for each website should be a waste of valuable time and energy.

I would like to help Crete Gazette. How can I do that?

There are many ways that you can help us: