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...