A few weeks later in December, Alfred Taban, a former BBC correspondent in Khartoum, started the Juba Monitor which is now South Sudan’s second English daily. Mr. Taban’s Khartoum Monitor was banned by the Arab rulers along with five other South Sudanese owned newspapers printed in Khartoum when the south became independent. The Juba Monitor is also printed at The Citizen which is the only newspaper with a printing machine in South Sudan.

At the dialogue forum for the media and security services, both sides were called on to get along with each other. But the event didn’t seem to ease tensions. A spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, or S.P.L.A. as the new country’s army is more popularly known, told reporters what they could cover and what would be risky for them — a list that included covering the army, for example. Philip Chol, a spokesman for military intelligence, said: “If you’re a responsible journalist, you will do something that is applicable to the country.”

Many reporters got angry. “The recent actions are actually the ones we suffered from in Khartoum,” said Mr. Taban, addressing the case of The Destiny. “I mean we’re trying to establish a democracy here.”

Many of the reporters who had come to the event said they had had bad experiences with the new military leaders who now ruled the country after years of oppression by the regime in the north. Mr. Ariath said when he once wrote about an official’s business deals, he got a phone call. If the paper ran the article, the person at the other end said, Mr. Ariath would get into trouble. The Citizen ran the article. Mr. Ariath was not arrested, but the editor in chief, Mr. Bol, was. Mr. Bol has been arrested three times since 2007 by South Sudanese authorities for articles that accused officials of corruption and mismanagement.

At 1 a.m., well after the writing and editing in The Citizen’s newsroom was done, four young men sat in the pale light of battery-powered halogen lamps inside the printing house next door. Listening to a smartphone playing Arabic folk music, they folded fresh copies of the newspaper by hand because the old German press couldn’t fold them automatically.

At dawn, Juba’s paperboys lined up in front of The Citizen. Some of them read the paper. Mr. Ariath’s article made it to the front page — with no misplaced letter in the headline, just a comma: “Deputy Minister Calls for Security, Media Cooperation.”