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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 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

By Sheila Curran Bernard   ·                      Sheila Curran Bernard is an award-winning filmmaker and consultant and the author of  Documentary Storytelling: Creative Non-Fiction on Screen , now in its third edition. A teacher of screenwriting emailed me recently because he'd been asked to write a documentary. He didn't know where to start, and was trying to locate some completed scripts to study. While these might prove useful, I knew they wouldn't adequately convey the work ahead, or reveal important differences in the scripting process. How does one  write  a documentary? To explain: Fiction screenwriters have long borrowed documentary techniques, and documentary filmmakers rely heavily on the tools of dramatic storytelling. As I wrote in an earlier article, Documentary Storytelling: The Drama of Real Life , both groups need to worry about protagonists ...

​ In 2010, the Caribbean Media Corporation pioneered live coverage of  the 39th CARIFTA Games to television stations across the region and via the World Wide Web on Easter weekend from the Cayman Islands. The CMC, which has produced ground-breaking television coverage of the Olympic Games and key IAAF world events, collaborated with the North American, Central American and Caribbean Athletics Association (NACAC) with the sponsorship of the telecommunications company, LIME, to bring all three days of coverage from the Truman Bodden Sports Complex. The three days of live coverage included commentary from broadcast journalists Jason Harper and Hubert Lawrence with analysis by Kareem Streete-Thompson, the Cayman Olympian who now coaches in Florida. Sports journalist Terry Finisterre, who is now a LIME corporate communications official, covered the previous edition of the games in his native St Lucia, and he proved no less instrumental in providing track-side interviews. In ...

It is not every day you find a Caribbean philosopher-politician (not every day you find one of those creatures either, I hear you say) who hits the mark - or rather hits it out of the park - on a subject close to six million hearts, West Indies Cricket. But Camillo Gonsalves, who just happens to be the foreign minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, delivers an incisive commentary of the abundance of racism in cricket commentary and writing, cloaked as it often is in the stereotypes of the tourism: sun, sand, skin. The victory of the West Indies over the rest of the world in T20 Cricket at the teenage, women's and senior men's levels continues to reverberate through the region. Sadly, though, the road to victory has been strewn with the worst of our cricket critics abroad. Here, Gonsalves dissects with the precision I'm sure he expects from a good Cabinet Paper, the hearts and masks of racial and ethnic prejudice that have toiled to set expectations of under-achiev...

George Lamming once opined at a regional media conference in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1986, that civil unrest would most likely erupt should Barbados' national television station remove Days of Our Lives, with its trappings of American upper-middle class conspicuous consumption, duplicitous characters swirling around in a moral vacuum, and storylines that defy pure logic, if not adult reasoning. The year was 1977. No, make that 1965 - that was the year we were transported to when Days of Our Lives was introduced to Barbados 37 years ago. Yes, the distributor started the daily fix for Barbadian viewers from the very first episode. We had colour television then but everything about the world of the Hortons was black and white. And a nation tried to play catch-up ever since. No CBC mandarin ever dared test Lamming's theory; many shared it. Indeed, in the early 1990s, CBC's marketing manager Noel Lynch expanded on the idea with his introduction of The Bold and the Beautiful...

"Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin." I've spent this July 4th marking 30 years in my vocation, thanking the Almighty and the giants on whose shoulders I stand, the people without whose direct action I would not still be standing after 30 years: * Julian Rogers (who did better than hire by lighting a fire) * Tony Cumming (who actually did hire me first) * Claude Graham (who put me on the announcer's roster and my programmes on the schedule) * Clairmonte Taitt (who first opened the CBC microphone to me in my Bajanised reading of a VS Naipaul short story) * Leslie Seon (who gave me my first Outside Broadcast anchor shot in his own patch of perfection, Remembrance Day, 1985) * Milton Gibbs and * Sharon Marshall who shaped me into a television journalist) * Jim Brown (for almost everything good in Washington DC) * Harold Hoyte and * John Wickham of The Nation *CANA's Trevor Simpson , * Ulric Hetsberger , * Reudon Eversley , and * Wendy Thomps...

Pictures to your ears - they're the stuff that Radio is made of. From commercials to drama to live outside broadcasts, Radio is a medium of imagination, of endless possibilities, and boundless dimensions. This programme is about using sounds - pictures - to make radio features and breathe life into news reports. Pictures to Your Ears is a four-part, 30-minute training guide to using sound in radio news features. Produced and presented by Julius Gittens in 1998. Taking part were Mike Gandon of City University, and Johnson Jn Rose, CANARadio.

  I suspect that we will shortly be returning to this matter of media ownership, assuming we had departed from it in the first place, of course.  Given the thirst for post-mature forms of media - though millions of Caribbean people bear no resemblance to the wired middle classes of North America in terms of access to ICT - we still need to discuss forms of traditional media that may be more responsive and responsible to the needs of our people, certainly while embracing new technologies and forms of communication that include more voices and audiences rather than further splintering them. Tangentially speaking, we also need to resist the temptation to cite change in some parts of the world to justify inaction in ours. Already in the Caribbean, a new 'digital elite' spread myth as gospel: so-called social media have made traditional media obsolete, that the smartphone has made terrestrial television and the newspaper and the radio irrelevant anachronisms and that the citiz...

Professor Aggrey Brown   "Rather, in examining and assessing what the media are in the Caribbean, we came upon the question - Talking with Whom? Do we have infrastructures and channels for communication without communications processes in the Caribbean?"  - from "Talking with Whom", Brown and Sanatan, 1987. For hundreds of us in the Caribbean - the name meant, and means, so much. Aggrey. Aggrey the teacher, Aggrey the torturer, Aggrey the brain, Aggrey the critic, Aggrey the angry, the sage, the visionary, the thinker, the talker. Dare we see his like again? I hope so. If any of his searing intellect, his fiery passion, his incisive and insightful criticism - and his caring about and for the West Indian Civilisation are anything to go by, then there are scores of Aggreys in the making, thanks to him, ever since 1974. For 22 tumultuous years, he was Mr. CARIMAC , synonymous with the training school, research crucible, lab and temple for Caribbean c...

 Caribbean Media Centre, Bridgetown (CMC) A question mark need not follow that headline, as it so often appends itself to ideas on this and many other little rocks in the Atlantic pond. I return to something I've been advocating and others have been talking about for some time now - a media farm: a single cooperative space where media artists and entrepreneurs can operate; a cottage industry in air-conditioned comfort; a one-stop shop for clients and creators - its eventual shape can be limited only by our imagination... and our resolve. I know of many Barbadian producers and filmmakers who crave a place to lay their hats, grab face time in a conference room, 'hold a corner' for their creative engine room, get access to a decent printer/copier etc. Picture a score of office enclosures, one-room suites and a central large space that's farmed out to occupants freely and at cost to outsiders - a soundstage or multicamera studio with audience bleachers, perhaps. S...

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Full disclosure: this may be viewed as somewhat self-serving. It may well be. I feel I have some idea of what it must feel like to be Andrew Mason. A lot of people like him for what he does and a helluva lot of people hate him for it. A lot more people don't like what he does and plenty more people hate him for it. I, too, will admit to having inhabited all of the above camps over the years, going back to 1983 when as a gangly youngster I would record his CBC Player of the Day programmes on Saturday afternoons at CBC Radio. Andrew can be as acerbic as he can be saccharine, witty as well as woefully cliché-ridden, energetic and enervating all at once. I have lived to hear him wish for the day when an elite panel of expert regional cricket commentators would be created, then hear him criticise the very idea of a panel when CANARadio (later CMC) created CricketPlus , which I produced from its inception until 2001. He was on that panel, too. The word 'mercurial' is for ther...

By Julius Gittens Derek Walcott's poem, "A city's death by fire", is a poignant and memorable recollection of the Great Fire of 1948 in Central Castries that razed three-quarters of the town. It left 2,000 people homeless, many of them with nothing left but the clothes on their backs. Accounts from newspapers of the time speak of the gutting of much of St Lucia's history dating back to Amerindian settlement - the destruction of government offices, including the Education Department to the public library, said to contain one of the best reference sections in the West Indies, to private collections of Carib artefacts and papers since settlement. Walcott, a gangly 18-yea-old on the cusp of literary greatness after meeting the great Frank Collymore that very year, was a stunned witness who all day "walked abroad among the rubbled tales, shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar". His chronicle by candlelight of Castries's death by f...