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A Man For All Seasons, Barbados Today I wasn't a fan of that headline. Not at first. But it was a Ridley Greene headline, as I would discover hours before it would go to press. So I knew I was today years old and had something new to learn. "They're still of the first water," the headline ran. Cryptic, stylish, oblique even. It was for a news feature I wrote on the government's report on trace levels in our groundwater of a weedkiller widely used throughout the sugar industry, Atrazine, with links to cancer in lab rats. Pervasive, yes, in trace amounts, I hasten to add (It has since emerged that the levels of nitrogen fertilisers pose a bigger threat to our health). That was 30 years ago. For that investigative piece, I won a PAHO Award and brought attention not only to pesticides in our environment, however briefly, but to a brand new environment beat at The Nation. "They're still of the first water." It was sensible, calm, reassuring and bade any r

Veteran broadcaster, journalist and musician Ken Richards died in Dominica on May 21, 2023, aged 67 ( Photo: WINN FM/Nature Isle News) In the last three years of his life, together with his son Jared in London, and operating from Dominica, Ken Richards began a news programme on their online radio station called  Old Street Audacity Radio (OSAR) . In between the sounds of sweet pan, Cadence Lypso, and reggae were tidbits of news and information. Ken made this little one-man radio station sound like old  Radio Caribbean International  - good old RCI. How dare he do this?  It was the sheer audacity of a man who gave 40 years of yeoman service as a regional journalist to such regional outfits as CANA and Radio Antilles and the BBC Caribbean Service, to news leaders in their own countries - Observer Radio in Antigua and Barbuda and WINN FM in St. Kitts and Nevis, yet beginning with humble service to the Catholic radio, Voice of the Islands, and the state broadcaster, Dominica Broadcasting S

The storm-coverage role of ZNS Bahamas and CBC Barbados this year alone, and the recent work of ABS Antigua and Barbuda, DBS Dominica, ZBVI and Radio Anguilla, among others, during Hurricanes Irma and Maria should further reaffirm the still vital part that public broadcasting has to play in this part of the world.  The one thing that public and state broadcasters can assure is free, universal access to a strong signal. The myopic decision, then, to shut down or emasculate pubcasters in the Caribbean region says nothing abou t broadcasting and society and says everything about personalities and politics.  When lives are at stake, a North American/Latin American, 'leave-it-to-the-market' approach is ominously devastating. Even the good ole municipal market, the very crucible of capitalism, is made public and regulated at the 'interest, necessity and convenience' of the public.  Until our leaders figure it out, spare a thought, then, for the region's surviving &

Hoyte of The Nation (1941-2019) Editorial, Barbados TODAY May 14, 2019 It is not a safe idea in small, independent developing nations such as ours:   the notion of a free press. In what has long been considered the freest black nation on earth, Harold Hoyte might not have made that idea any safer – that remains the people’s job. What he did was make it safe for others to believe in that dangerous idea and to consider it essential, relevant and non-negotiable in a democracy. What he also made safe was an environment in which young, independent-minded, creative adults could practise their craft without having to peer over their shoulders constantly at a looming phalanx of ministers, merchants, lawyers and sycophants baying for their blood if not their pound of flesh. This is the mission of a visionary; such a man was Harold Hoyte, founder of the  Nation Newspapers , without whom it is well-nigh impossible to conjure up additional upstart startups in a democratic natio

Balance and Control:  Trevor "Holly" Hollingsworth, mastering CANARadio CricketPlus, during a live transmission at Kensington Oval, Bridgetown (BARBADOS NATION) On February 11, 2018, I lost one of my closest friends for almost 25 years, and a 'gentle giant' of a technical producer, Trevor C. Hollingsworth - a 45-year veteran of Barbadian and Caribbean radio.  A week later, the veteran Trinidadian cricket broadcaster and writer Fazeer Mohammed, in his weekly column on cricket for the Sun, offered his reminiscences of the co-founder of CANARadio (later CMC ) CricketPlus , the international cricket commentary broadcasts from the Caribbean - our very West Indian answer to the Beeb's Test Match Special. Faz's tribute also follows .

Barbados' superstar Rihanna - Riri - is now 30 . The world remains enthralled, and rightly so, by the extraordinary, often unparalleled, success of this island girl's dominance of popular music for a decade, studded not only by breaking records set by Elvis Presley and the Beatles but by being honoured in her homeland with the renaming of her home street,  Rihanna Drive . It is noteworthy that she grew up in roughly a square mile of urban Barbados that is the veritable hometown of Barbadian pop music and star performers - from Jackie Opel and the Opels to Draytons Two and the Mighty Gabby. That she stands on the shoulders of giants is not in question. But so many of those proverbial giants remain unknown to the vast majority of Rihanna's fans. They are not as terribly well known by today's Barbadians themselves, either, as their heyday was from around 1963 to 1983. Their music-making emerged under the heavy, heady influence of bossa nova , then soul , r hythm

The media in the Caribbean region have been pivotal in breaking the silence around violence and abuse of children. Greater awareness of child rights deprivations and violations in this region is in part due to increased media focus on these issues. In 2016, I edited Our Children, Our Media : A Guide for Caribbean Practitioners - for the region's journalists and broadcasters on behalf of the  Association of Caribbean Media Workers . It's intended to help build the capacity of the media executives and professionals in traditional and new media institutions to implement policies governing reporting on children’s issues. Also included is a model  Caribbean children's broadcast code . This work followed from a workshop that brought together legal, child rights and communications specialists, editors, reporters and broadcasters from across the Eastern Caribbean and Suriname, held in Antigua in late 2015. It is the product of a collaboration involving the ACM , the Caribb

Back to basics. Below are two guides to writing and producing radio news, with an emphasis on newswriting, used in my training and journalism education work. A Caribbean Guide to Radio News is part of the original text for my MA International Journalism thesis project, used subsequently to develop station style guides. It was also the  main text that brought together the basics of writing, interviewing and presentation in the UWI Open Campus's course on broadcast journalism. Chapter 3 on page six covers writing. The chapter, News Broadcasting, is from the Handbook for Caribbean Journalists , this classic, must-read text still used by veterans, though long out of print, sadly. Yes, there is such a thing as Caribbean Standard English - not a dialect per se , but a variant of Internationally Accepted English in usage in the Anglophone Caribbean. Read more about this in the excellent Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford University Press) by the renowned Caribbean lin