Herald Media Partners

The Commonwealth's Big Three Broadcasters are investing heavily in their free streaming platforms: Clockwise from top right, BBC iPlayer , ABC iView , BBC Sounds and CBC | Gem  threatens a gaping digital divide between these richest organisations in Commonwealth broadcasting and public broadcasters in the Caribbean, none of which has even switched over to digital terrestrial transmission much less developed viable, free, standalone streaming platforms. Across an ever-evolving media landscape, the winds of change are blowing stronger than ever. The Commonwealth's Big Three broadcasters - the BBC , CBC Canada , and Australia's ABC - have boldly declared their accelerated shift towards an all-digital realm, leaving behind the analogue era of long-wave (LW), shortwave (SW) medium-wave (MW/AM), and very high frequency (FM/VHF/UHF) radio and television transmissions over the next decade. Yet, nowhere is this challenge more apparent than in the Caribbean, where digital terrest...

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, Domi...