Above: Illustration by fill_ser3/DepositPhotos

BitDepth 1564 for May 25, 2026

This story has probably been told before here, but TechNewsTT did not emerge
from prescient insight into the future of journalism, it was born out of someone else’s problem.

A communications specialist at Sandra Welch-Farrel and Associates, the agency handling press relations for Digicel, called one Monday morning to ask whether I knew of any specialist sites they could send their more technical press releases to.

I suggested a couple of sites based in Jamaica that they could consider and then thought about it some more.
Let this be a lesson. Someone else’s problem can be your opportunity.

Later that day, I fired up an instance of WordPress and some YouTube videos and made a solid working week’s worth of mistakes and FUBARs.

On the Friday of that week, I sent her the URL for the website you are on now.
That was twelve years ago. If you want to know more about what’s happened since then, it’s chronicled at absurd length in a report to readers filed on the tenth anniversary of its existence.

Later this week, the Media Institute of the Caribbean is hosting a two-day journalism summit to address the challenges facing local media.

This is, let’s just say, somewhat overdue. Of the 1,115 stories posted here under my byline, 109 of them go on and on about the business of journalism in an era of technology challenge.

One is tempted to urge the reader to just use the search bar at the top of this page and to end the column right here, but there are current matters of a distinctly local nature that demand discussion.

For one, there are the dozens of working journalists who have either been abandoned, in the case of my colleagues at TTNewsday in January, been sidelined as freelancers or seen their assignment count dramatically reduced as a cost cutting measure or, as was announced last week, will be retrenched to reduce headcount at the Trinidad Express.

This bloodbath of talent, much of it seeping from faithful employees who believed in their contract with their employers who have now come face to face with the reality that in the equation of plant, shareholders, management and labour, the workforce is the least tangled bush to prune, the fretting of trade unions be damned.

To this day, the remaining print publications in this country continue to throw veiled barbs at each other as if they were in competition.

On May 10, the Express reported the continuing financial woes of Guardian Media (GML), which deepened its river of red ink in the first quarter of 2026, posting a pre-tax loss of $7.9 million.

The ANSA McAl Group, GML’s parent company is deep in its “2X” revitalisation strategy, posting a profit of $62.8 million for the same quarter. It’s unclear how long ANSA McAl will continue to hemorrhage cash at this rate without rethinking either strategy or investment.

That will probably come when the total of quarterly losses surpasses the selling price for the entire enterprise.

On May 21, the TTGuardian reported that the Express was planning to retrench seven of its 33 editorial staff, 21 percent of its news-gathering workforce.

One Caribbean Media, parent company of the Express, announced an after-tax profit of $4.36 million for its first quarter.

Every media house supplements its core newsroom with a nimbus of freelance talent, contributors and columnists, so it’s unclear what effect this will have on the news product, but reducing staffing by a fifth is a deep cost-cutting strategy and freelancers are even easier to shed.

The Express and Guardian are not in competition with each other, they are competing with the utter disinterest of an entire generation of digital natives who never developed the habit of scanning newspaper pages, smudging their fingers with ink that never seems to dry, and gleaning broader insights about the world they live in from an assemblage of copy and photographs curated by editors.

One might be expected to anticipate, given this parlous state of affairs, that journalists, both substantively employed and not, along with media managers, advertisers and marketing teams and the owners of the wallets that fund these enterprises would recognise this week’s summit as an opportunity to have the discussion that media should have had ten years ago, but was still too flush with cash to contemplate such a thing.

Put another way, if the boat is leaking, the incoming rush of water needs to be bailed by all hands. Instead, the leadership of local media seems content to continue playing a vigorously competitive game of verbal volleyball on the listing ship’s deck, addressing no discernible audience and mouthing only vague concerns about the rising waterline.

The business overseers of media overruled its core rationale at that point, media’s managers failed their newsrooms.

The absurd and outdated division between advertising, management and the newsroom has created an environment of enforced mutual ignorance among all parties.

In an age in which every story has a reader and engagement count, newsrooms have no idea how their stories land with readers.

Advertising departments, generally oblivious to the character of the print editions in which they sell space, remain adamantly clueless about how to sell advertising to the merchants who might actually want to place strategic campaigns in online media.

If they did, they might have objected to the ongoing practice of placing Google ads in prime online real estate, which nets fractions of a cent on the dollars that advertising in those spaces should command. Some money is not always better than no money.

Marketing is either funneled into forgotten byways for eyes long departed or proceeds in a grandfatherly stumble through social media channels, only serving to reinforce the apparent irrelevance of legacy media.

At least part of the problem is that today’s media managers are quite knowledgeable about an age of media governance they largely inherited, with little understanding of the imperatives that created it in the first place.

Having tended old fires lit decades ago; they have no idea how to create a new blaze and now absentmindedly stab at the embers that are left hoping to get some momentary heat out of the charred remnants of their media empires.

What should we be talking about this week?

First is redefining the mission of media and the importance of preserving media institutions as recognisably independent providers of the best available facts in primary reporting must be the critical priority.

Media houses have traditionally functioned along the lines of traditional business, generating returns for shareholders, paying dividends, providing profit incentives for top level leadership.
We now face a scenario in which that math must be inverted in the interests of preserving the core mission of citizen focused journalism.

The newsroom is not a cost; it is the whole point of media presence. Nobody tunes into a broadcast or buys a newspaper in anticipation of the advertising. But reporting alone, pursued along the lines that have brought us to here, cannot be the whole of the media’s presence.

The funnel of media preparation, in which vast volumes of data were compressed into a 48 page newspaper or a fifteen-minute news segment presumes that information is a difficult commodity to access. That is no longer true.

What then is the value of media? Presenting the facts must become the starting point. A defined editorial perspective must encompass as many valid and supportable viewpoints as possible before laying out a suggested course of contemplation for its audience.

The audience has a general idea of what’s happened. Journalism must dissect that information, deepen the understanding of it and bring clarity to the news consumer.

The ramparts that have separated the media from its audience must be seen to be torn down from the media side, having already been shattered on the media consumer side.

Media must make the best use of its newsroom personalities, amplifying their influence while harnessing it to the conceptual umbrella of the house approach and agenda in pursuing its news-gathering.
Traditional media prized its impassive faceless presentation of facts. Today’s news consumer demands character and point of view.

The media’s output, ALL OF IT, is its treasure. Archiving original footage, audio recordings, reporter’s full drafts as well as final work should be part of the new mandate of library services.

Not just because it will benefit other reporters when they require first hand reference, but because while office equipment will break, computers and broadcast gear will become outdated, the real value of a media house is the MEDIA is produces.

Online presence should be seen as an opportunity, not a burden. Walled garden platforms are interested in a different manifestation of attention from that of the committed media house.

Professional media is not about clicks and views, it is about responsible reporting that stands up to scrutiny. The news audience wants access to reliable, robust information. Stories online must be accurately categorised, tagged and indexed in order to become assets and not just a corpus of data for someone else to sort out.

The attrition of newsrooms and experienced journalists is unacceptable. It may well be time to start thinking of journalism in TT as a public good and plan for its continuity accordingly, ensuring that the value proposition for its audience is strong enough to prompt real world support.

Prepare before the summit.

To understand how the wider world is dealing with these same challenges, visit Nieman Labs, Poynter, search on “Journalism” on Substack and specifically Luis G’s NewsPain Points.
Julian Rogers’ assessment of the challenges is also a good read on the regional challenge.