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Due to a human's cut-and-paste error or a computer programs' software glitch, several of the most important paragraphs from last week's "Road to Mérida" interview with Narco News (http://www.narconews.com) founder Al Giordano, in which Giordano sends an important message to conference attendees and Narco News and J-School enthusiasts, got left off the end of it. Please check out the missing text below, or better yet visit http://www.drcnet.org/wol/272.html#algiordano to read or reread the corrected interview in full.

Giordano writes:

A couple of favors I'd like to ask from the attendees:

May my readers forgive me in these weeks for not being as responsive as you're accustomed to via e-mail with all your queries and questions. My e-mail box is overflowing to capacity a lot and sometimes mail is bouncing. That's probably going to get worse for the next four weeks as we finalize the plans for these events. It's involving a lot more work than meets the eye. Prior to the conference, the amount of news on Narco News may temporarily decrease. But once the summit gets going it will exponentially increase.

May my journalist colleagues seeking interviews with Narco News in Mérida talk to Luis Gómez. He is our spokesman at the Mérida Summit. He's a Mexican journalist who lives in the Andes and you already know him by his stellar reports from Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador this year. Now you're going to meet him in person. Luis, in addition to being a top shelf journalist, is a very articulate, fun and knowledgeable guy. He has better people skills than I do. He will be the voice of Narco News. He knows many of the leaders attending this event from South America that you're going to want to interview. He's going to be the voice and face of Narco News at this event. I won't be giving the interviews.

And finally, may the conference attendees, particularly so many of my old friends, excuse the reality that makes it necessary for the School of Authentic Journalism to be a closed shop. We have no more room for students. And we have an enormous reporting job to pull off over those four days. Only students, professors and staff will have the laminates to enter our closed campus facilities, near the conference. It's an autonomous operation. There's not physical room for additional people to "monitor" the courses. If you haven't been asked by me to be a student or a faculty member prior to coming to Mérida, we're not taking new ones there. I'm sorry about that: we are going to do part of our program publicly with a journalists' panel at the Mérida Summit, and there will be a party at some point hosted by Narco News, the J-School, and our friends at Salón Chingón, to which our readers and friends will be invited and where we can kick back and celebrate together. Of course, some of our faculty members will be giving presentations at the conference, too. I'll be introducing Mario Menendez at a plenary session. But mainly we have a lot of reporting to do for all the readers back home who can't be physically present.

You folks who are attending and participating in the conference are going to be the stars of this show. We're just the reporters. Help us, and especially our 26 students, do our jobs. Whatever message you bring to Mérida, say it well, and we'll make sure you're heard all over the world. And see you at the Narco News party. I'll be introducing another member of our news team, briefly, there: that old Dobro guitar that the narco-bankers failed to win in the "Drug War on Trial" case. Because it looks like the drug war may be over before many people think, and that there will soon be a new generation of Authentic Journalists doing my job better than I do, and so I have to start practicing for my next career.

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