Above: Illustration by VisualGeneration/DepositPhotos

BitDepth 1566 for June 08, 2026

The challenges facing primary source reporting, that 20th century artifact known as journalism, are global, but the issues facing the small island developing states of the Caribbean archipelago are significant and growing bigger.

This reporting of the discussions that took place during the second day of the Media Institute of the Caribbean’s (MIC) summit on media viability on May 29 and considers the ideas discussed across four broad areas of immediate concern to independent media houses.

The economics of news production

Nazima Raghubir of Guyana and vice-president of the Association of Caribbean Media, considered the challenge of establishing the value of news in the region.

“[In our small populations] in the Caribbean, the reality is it’s not the culture to pay for news, for information. The other major challenge is that if you want to bring news and information, you have to invest heavily in the costs that come with the newsroom. Traveling, for instance, within the Caribbean is very expensive.”

“In Guyana specifically, the advertising pie is very small. That small advertising pie has to be divided between media, cultural and sporting activities and so on. The reality that payment for news and paying for news is not something that we’re accustomed to in the region. Some of my colleagues have been walking this line to see whether paid subscriptions, setting up a paywall is something that is necessary.”

“Following the closure of the Starbroek News, Kaiteur News had a brief online survey to find out if people are willing to pay for the newspaper and are willing to pay for an online subscription. Following that, they opted to raise the cost of the physical newspaper.”

“At least one online entity experimented a bit with a paywall for very specific stories. If we want to continue in the news business that is definitely a route that we’ll have to go.”

Lasana Liburd, editor of the digital native news and sport website Wired868.com explained that, “Trying to get the paid subscribers is particularly tricky because of our size.”

“In the Caribbean, we don’t have enough readers to be able to take the chance to cut that down by 50, 60 percent when you put a paywall up. The truth is, if every user gave me a dollar, just one dollar a month, that’d be perfectly fine, but that’s not happening, right?”

“The other route would be to try to get a wide audience to place advertisers on the back of the right audiences. It seemed that you could only really choose one.”

“Trying to do both simultaneously would clash with each other. If I put in the paywall, I’m not as attractive to advertisers because I have fewer people.
It’s the reason I’ve never used Google Ads on the website. If a company can get advertising space and pay $8 for it, how am I going to ask you to pay $2,000 for an ad spot?”

Appealing to the news consumer

Discussing audience numbers turned the discussion to the challenge of rebuilding the appeal of primary source reporting to news consumers used to receiving half-baked, poorly sourced or simply incorrect information from social media feeds.

“The media is attempting to diversify our content, making it more marketable, that’s very commendable across the region,” Raghubir said.

“People have realized that you write for the newspaper, you still got to produce a short video and put it on TikTok or put it on YouTube or Facebook to drive the audience to the work that you’ve done or that online article that you’ve done. I see people are experimenting with this. It’s a bit of giving in to the big tech, but we have to do it.”

“I felt the rhythm of the traditional media house was changing [when I started Wired868],” Liburd said.

“When I got into the media, internet at home wasn’t a thing. Cable news wasn’t a thing. People would have to call into the media house to find out who won a tennis match or a football match, or they would be finding out his first time the following day. That’s a bygone era now.”

“We were actually the first online publication that was tailor-made for smartphones. Readers didn’t have to scroll left and scroll right to see the whole paragraph. These things seem very weird now because we’re so long past it.”

“Looking back, I think traditional media had always been slow in getting the online publications up because they realized [the value of] ads online, was so much less than the traditional paper that they tried to keep the paper going for as long as they possibly could.”

“From the start [I was trying to find] the sweet spot between getting an audience, but also doing real news that could have an impact on society and persons around you, right? If I were only interested in hits, I could make videos and get lots of hits that way. If that’s what they’re interested in. But the role of journalism is about more than just hits.”

“Last night, I posted a guest piece from Mark Meredith about the hotel development in Tobago. An issue like that is never going to go viral. My target audience has always been people who want to know a little bit more.”

“No matter which topic I address, I have to make sure and do it in an intelligent, kind of comprehensive way. If my strength is to get information that other people can’t get, then I’m not going to try to be fast. I’m going to try to be strong.”

“[We need to have an] understanding what our audiences want and what they need,” said Wesley Gibbings, vice-president of the MIC.
“I don’t think that our newsroom discussions too often lead in that direction. There’s a kind of formulaic approach to the content that we produce that sometimes totally denies or is ignorant of this question.”

The challenge of collaboration

A key discussion considered the practicalities and value of improving the collaboration between existing media houses to create a more compelling news package.

Brent Houston summarised the three challenges that media houses must face before forging any kind of real world collaborative framework.

“One is the most productive ways to go is to collaborate while still competing a bit. Collaboration is the key word, but it’s also formalized and organized collaboration and editorial reporting an editorial model based on sharing of ideas and resources and stories.”

“The second one is more [business focused]. Everyone’s trying to figure out new business models to bring revenue in, and there are ways to be more efficient at doing that by sharing business models that work to bring revenue in.”

“A third thing to do is to create a network that brings together both individual journalists, new organizations and traditional organizations.”

“It needs to be done quickly, with a message of solidarity that goes out to potential donors, foundations, other people who will be the main support for what you do eventually.”

Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, warned that in his experience, there will always be mavericks who are too independent to fit into those frameworks, to set aside competition in the service of improved reporting.

“It sounds simple, but I used to say you’ve got two people working together, you’ve got a partnership. If you’ve got three people, the more people you get involved, the more you need formality.”

Former CNN anchor and correspondent Jim Clancy pointed to the example set by Reese Schonfeld (1931-2020, co-founder of CNN) who worked on the Independent Television News Association, which strengthened the capacity of independent stations across the US and filled out their newscasts beyond the ability of their individual newsrooms.

“One of the faults in many Caribbean newsrooms [is that] a lot of the stories are so localized, they assume that whoever’s going to be looking at this already knows all the background information, and the truth is they don’t,” Clancy said.

“If I’m in the Caribbean and I watch some of the news networks, I’m going, wait a minute, what are they talking about? When that you’re writing for an audience that isn’t necessarily completely local, it changes you from a reporter into a correspondent, where you actually are taking the lay of the land and laying out how this is vital, how it’s different, why it matters in this case, and sharing a perspective that can be understood in other small island states.”

Wesley Gibbings reminded summit attendees that those broad principles have been deployed in the Caribbean previously in institutions such as Radio Antilles, the Caribbean News Agency and even the BBC Caribbean, which promoted networking, sharing and pooling of journalistic resources.

MIC president Kiran Maharaj pointed to the experience of its Caribbean Investigative Journalism Network, which distributes its reporting on a Creative Commons basis and has had its work picked up in Latin America and the Caribbean diaspora.

“A lot of media houses in the region and in Latin America picked up [early reporting on human trafficking]. We also spoke about it at two radio stations in the tri-state area in the US and that diaspora is huge.”

“We saw a lot of the traffic flowing was out of that area. The same story, if we had printed it just in Antigua or just in Trinidad, you would get a limited number of views, but you put it on CIJN and it was multiplied almost ten times.”

Will Fitzgibbon, senior reporter and Global Partnership Coordinator for The Examination noted that, “There have been so many attempts at creating these coalitions that we know which ones work and which ones don’t.”
“We know that more concentrated, specific coalitions, coalitions that have a geographic focus or maybe a topical focus, are easier to survive and thrive more easily than broad coalitions. “

“I’ve seen many coalitions fail because they had a noble ambition of regional representation, for example, but it became too unwieldy. There were too many different characters with too many different priorities.”

“The collaborations we’ve seen succeed in recent years, have become more and more focused. If you look at the real success stories in recent years, ProPublica’s local news initiative, for example, or how the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London has, in the last year or two, made a conscious decision to restructure its focus, to go from a newsroom that had a global remit and tried to appeal to all the whole public worldwide to focusing on domestic British matters.”

“They realised they can do better journalism and build a stronger, more generous donor class with a clear identity.”