MEDIA: Pioneering Caribbean News Agency Closes, Leaving a Void

By Zadie Neufville Reprint | | Print |

Peter Richards, Susan Lee, and Zadie Neufville

PORT OF SPAIN-NEW YORK-KINGSTON, Jan 8 2002 (IPS) - The Caribbean’s premier news agency has been forced to abruptly close and to appeal for help from the region’s businesses and governments.

The Barbados-based Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC), in a statement, described the shutdown as “temporary”. It cited “a significant decline in business activities, particularly in the last few months” and said the shutdown was necessary to undertake “urgent financial restructuring.”

At least 50 of the company’s 54 employees have been laid off and few expected it to reopen.

“They’ve announced it is a temporary closure but it’s a definite closure,” said Rickey Singh, a veteran Caribbean journalist who served as regional affairs correspondent.

The fate of the company now hinges on bailout talks that began Sunday between CMC’s Board of Directors and member governments of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). CMC also is seeking investment from the private sector.

On the agenda of this week’s talks in Turks and Caicos are questions about what will happen to the 50 CMC employees who were laid off and ideas for a more “viable and profit-oriented” strategy for the future, according to CMC Chairman Lester Spaulding.

CMC’s apparent demise brings to an end 25 years of operations for the Caribbean News Agency (CANA), an innovative region-wide service often hailed as a success among Third World media. CMC was formed just over a year ago to bring together print, radio, television, and Internet services previously provided separately by CANA and the 16-year-old Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU).

Management said the temporary closure meant “suspension of services of CANA Radio, CANA Wire and CBU television services.”

“What does this mean for people needing information coming out of the Caribbean?” asked Wilhelm Joseph, a Trinidadian-American lawyer living in the U.S. state of Maryland. “They are laying off 50 of 54 people and calling that a ‘restructuring.’ What’s really going on?”

CMC said it had sought help “from banks, shareholders and some governments in the region” before deciding on the closure, during which a team of four remaining staff members would restructure the company.

“The Board regrets that the region’s only source of indigenous news and programming has had to be suspended and it looks forward to when it will return to stronger and expanded operations,” the agency said.

CANA promoted itself as both an outgrowth of the regional integration movement and an instrument of fostering closer integration among the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. It was official conceived at the annual Caribbean heads of government summit of 1967, a time when states and civil society organisations increasingly were driven by the desire for closer and deeper interaction amongst the peoples of the Caribbean.

Formally launched in 1976, CANA’s principal shareholders had been governments and media owners throughout the Caribbean. Its existence seemed tenuous from the onset as the agency faced financial difficulties and increasing competition. In recent years, money problems forced some regional governments to pull out.

Over the years, CANA has had to deal with competition from a number of international media companies including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which provided most of its Caribbean programmes free to regional media, and the Reuters news agency, with which it partnered briefly.

Singh, who headed the now defunct Caribbean Media Workers Association (CAMWORK), said that while CANA and Reuters had previously exchanged news stories from within and outside the region respectively, “Reuters and Associated Press were moving aggressively back into the region.”

As with its founding, the agency’s closure comes when its services are considered key to regional integration, this time as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) strives to build the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME).

“To be without the services of such a critical institution as the CMC is to make our task, which is already difficult, even more so,” said CARICOM Secretary-General Edwin Carrington, who also serves as a CANA trustee.

Ronald Saunders, the Antigua and Barbuda high commissioner to London, lamented that the closure “takes us back to the conditions of a quarter of a century ago, when the Caribbean had to rely on news about itself from news agencies in London, Paris and Washington.”

“Failure to provide regional news, information, and analysis on a daily basis will deal a sad blow to our area at a time when we need it most,” added Saunders, a former CANA director.

Others were more angry than sad.

“CMC employees, its journalists in the field in particular, have been treated with absolute disrespect,” said Wesley Gibbings, president of the recently formed Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM). He highlighted “the lack of clarity regarding the payment of terminal benefits.” These include severance pay, money in lieu of accrued leave, and pensions.

Linda Hutchinson-Jaffar, who headed the agency’s bureau in Port of Spain, said that even before the closure, CANA was unable to meet its financial obligations to employees. “It had reached a point where I could not get paid for months, it was really a struggle,” she said.

The Society of Journalists and Media Persons (SJM) of Barbados expressed regret at the regional agency’s demise but said it should never have fallen into such financial disrepair in the first place, particularly as “it was the sole provider of indigenous Caribbean news.”

At least for the next few months, the closure likely will leave in the lurch countless small newspapers serving readers of Caribbean origin in North America.

“Most Caribbean newspapers here and in Canada are dependant almost entirely on CANA for news from the region,” said Michael Roberts, a U.S.-based journalist who has covered the Caribbean for many years. “The big problem is how papers here will fill the void.”

“It’s very unfortunate in today’s world where information is so critical that there’s the potential of the Caribbean being without its own news organisation,” said Karl Rodney, editor-in-chief of the New York-based CaribNews, a weekly that depended upon CANA.

Kenton K. Kirby, editor-in-chief of the New York-based Caribbean Life newspaper and himself a stringer for CANA in the mid-1970s, said, “Unlike other news services, CANA used people who were reporting on the ground – those who are more representative of the local news and its regional flavour.”