Herald Media Partners

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 re...

I shall return to the topic of the future of public broadcasting (now more often and perhaps more aptly referred to in the Caribbean as 'state-owned broadcasting'), particularly in the wake of the Allan Chastanet administration's decision to close Radio St Lucia after a near-half-century of service - based on specious but popular misconceptions about technological access and public broadcasting as inefficient peddler of government information . As I said, more on that later. For now, the focus is on the public broadcaster in the land where the St Lucian PM studied as a young man - Canada. While the poll discussed focuses on what one political party's supporters think of the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), much is revealed of the extent of the Canadian public's support for their bona fide public broadcaster, considering not only expanded choice of commercial Canadian channels but also the all-consuming footprint of next-door neighbour, Unite...

Part two of my interview with Barbadian independent filmmaker, Andrew Millington, for the University of the West Indies television programme, Research Room . This episode begins with a discussion of his recently re-released second feature film, "Zora's Dream", He touches on themes of the spiritual realm, memory, and struggle, not the least of which is the struggles of independent movie-making in the Caribbean.

First, full disclosure: Andrew Millington is an old friend from our days at Howard University. There he sat at the feet of the renowned Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, and alongside a fellow fine filmmaker in-the-making, Yao Ramesar of Trinidad and Tobago. We explore those relationships, Andrew's journey in independent film ("Guttaperc"; "Zora's Dream") and his art that has a sharp political (small p; big ideas) edge in an edition of Research Room, from UWItv , the new television service of the University of the West Indies, which streams online and is transmitted on the Caribbean Media Corporation's international channel, CaribVision.

A video version of a presentation delivered in March 2017 at a workshop on investigative reporting and financial journalism organised by  Jamaica's transparency organisation National Integrity Action (NIA) in partnership with the Caribbean Media Institute and the Association of Caribbean Media Workers. The presentation gives some of my thoughts on the state of play in accountability journalism in the English-speaking region, as it plays on television screens. (37 minutes) WATCH HERE: Investigative Journalism and Broadcast Media in the Caribbean