Herald Media Partners

No Fixed Place: Migrant Children and Education Cargado por JPAGmedia . - Mira películas y shows de TV enteros. Produced for UNICEF, this film examines the impact that the children of migrant workers in the Eastern Caribbean - mostly from Haiti and the Dominican Republic - are making on the region's education system, and asks whether education has adapted to the influx. Written and presented by Julius Gittens; Associate Producers Thalia Remy, Leroy Adolphus and Ben Meade; Photographed and edited by Lester Ifill. A Faith Motion Video production for UNICEF.

A Child's Right to Grow and Learn: The Roving Caregivers Cargado por JPAGmedia . - Mira películas y shows de TV enteros. A mini-documentary about how Christian Children's Fund's Roving Care Programme in Dominica reaches children from birth to three years of age while providing early stimulation for children and parenting education for parents. Young volunteers in the island's Carib Community and five other remote villages make regular visits to families and involve children in play that helps them develop motor, perceptual, emotional and thinking skills. They also offer tips to parents about how best to promote children’s health and safety. Written, produced and narrated by Julius Gittens; photographed and edited by Lester Ifill. A Faith Motion Video Production.

It's time we abandon our fatigued approach to talk radio in the Caribbean, with its open-phones: ever-swirling vortices of ignorance, prejudice and cynicism, with banality at the core. Move away from lazy open-phone shows, avoid "today we'll talk about..." or "our topic for today is..." BANNED. Don't even mention the word 'topic' or 'subject' on air.... From now on the issue/event/personality is actually a question and is posed in the form of a question. It's what any reporter starts with; you could do worse. Listen also to the talk radio shows I've highlighted. Web sites: Jeremy Vine, BBC Radio 2 and LBC 97.3 FM/London . The concept: POSE QUESTIONS as headlines for a segment as opposed to " next, we talk about diabetes ." RATHER: " What would you do if you doctor says you have diabetes?" OR " Are you controlling your diabetes ?" OR "Why is Diabetes killing so many Antiguans?" QUE...

It would be nothing short of astounding for a professional journalist to assume that entering a political campaign would be acceptable, ethical conduct, even in industries where some media organisations declare and promote bias. The principle of impartiality and neutrality – the most basic requirement of a professional journalist would be breached. The principle of neutrality is a commonsense ethical principle that need not be codified; it is part of the toolkit that a professional journalist brings to the job. Just as you need not have a published code of ethics to fire a plagiarizing or lying writer, you need not spell out the long-established ethical principle that journalists avoid conflicts of interest. Reporting on the news of the day involves reporting on the government and those who seek public office. Politics requires persuasive communication on the part of a candidate; how is the voter to choose wisely if he or she cannot be sure that the journalist seeking office or promoti...

If you can afford it, there's Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro), which brought non-linear digital audio editing to the masses of lowly radio producers and reporters in 1996. Radio hasn't been the same since... But it costs a bundle, now that it's part of the Adobe Creative Suite bundle... For my students, I've posted this introductory video tutorial to basic recording and editing with the next best thing - Audacity. It's FREE software, almost every bit as powerful as a full-featured Adobe Audition version 1.5, and it's available for download at www.audacity.sourceforge.net/ Here's how to go about downloading Audacity version 1.2.6: Now here's a short video tutorial on editing audio with Audacity: For continued learning on Audacity download these handy guides to Audio Editing by Mindy McAdams, in Adobe Acrobat files (.pdf): Super-Fast Guide to Audio Editing Editing Audio with Audacity (Part 2) But wait! There's more! Transom.org, par...

Way off the beaten radio track, I enjoyed producing election night for CNMG Television in Trinidad. Thanks to Knolly Whiskey for his great work in making the set design a reality, and to a great team of journalists and technical people at C. And respect due, of course, to the King of News/Talk, Julian Rogers, who fronted several hours of groundbreaking tv... Video did not kill the radio star!

I blog. You decide. Moyers and Olbermann - who was Goliath and who was David? No injuries reported, no giants slain. Only interesting insights into the arguments over news commentary versus screeching. Can Olbermann be added to the list of "screechers" along with O'Reilly and Limbaugh? Are they boundaries over which a good news commentator should not cross? Is this a liberal versus conservative argument (no accounting for taste, say the Romans) or is this about a commentator whose main selling point is the fact-count rather than the decibel level? Supporters distinguish Olbermann from the pack as actually being right, even prescient, about what he says about the Bush administration (his favourite food); critics say he's a liberal attack dog. But pay special attention to the interviewer. Bill Moyers proves why he's a worthy heir of the Murrow legacy at CBS - on PBS. Interviewing is 90 per cent listening. Read below and see why. By the way, Moyers himself was a news...

I thought I would reprise what I wrote back in 2002 when I was forced home by the Labour Commissioner of the Antiguan government on Feb. 1, 2002, on trumped-up allegations of working illegally in the country for eight months. I was working as the news and current affairs consultant and trainer for the independent Observer Radio. I also created and anchored a popular Sunday news review programme called The Big Issues - happily still on the air. This was my first statement on my departure and my views on Caribbean media. Much has been said about my forced exit from Antigua after I went there in April 2001 to train the staff for a new commercial radio station, Observer Radio, which has since become, according to independent survey, the leading quality radio station in the country. A lot of this comment has been couched in terms of free movement of skilled Caricom nationals and my political skill - or lack of it. Some of it has been brilliantly insightful; too much of it has been partisa...

For once, the Caribbean was integrated. Three o'clock, November 29th, 2007. Following radio news coverage on Thursday's earthquake produced some fissures and wobbling of its own. Most newsrooms, luckily, had access to the Internet. But where did we go? Not to the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Unit but to the US Geological Survey. No follow up. Not a call to anyone at UWI Seismic Unit, certainly not by any radio or television reporter in Barbados, where I was, or in a few other places I was monitoring. The coverage seemed to suffer in other countries where the journalists' lack of media experience was a greater issue than whether they'd been through an earthquake. I was appalled that in Antigua, for example, which has had far more experiences of earthquakes, it was treated as a little five-minute report inside a regular show of music and chatter (N.B. Having been live and continuous on radio through a quake and a flood there in 2001, I know how much the ...

This useful and handy little tome on radio marketing for local/community stations - and a useful quick guide for stations on the cusp of "re-engineering" is available (all but a few chapters) on this link: Participative Marketing for Local Radio (1) Marketing and radio It's worth ordering from the publisher in Australia, too.

A list (not exhaustive on Caribbean English radio stations currently streaming, frequently updated. Click on Caribbean Radio Stations On The Internet

While Caribbean broadcasters shut down their Medium Wave (AM) radio transmitters one by one, reports of the death of AM in the United States, whose economy we ape, are greatly exaggerated... AM RADIO YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW Every day, Americans spend more time with radio than TV or newspapers. Radio is everywhere. If you want to buy a car without a radio you’ll have to special-order it. Talk is radio’s most-listened-to, most Sales-opportune format. For 30 years in this industry, I’ve had lots of fun, worked real hard, and made a great living. But radio isn’t all I do. I’m also in retail, and am myself a radio advertiser. I’m a big, big fan. Every industry is changing. Like airlines, banks, and the family farm, life is very different in radio today than it was “when we got into the business.” And we can already see that radio will change even more in the near future than it has in the recent past. It’s human nature to dread change, but I am very optimistic about radio’s ...