30 May 2002, 891 words
Reading the latest MFO media survey, I was reminded of a breakfast meeting for Express editorial staff which was held 13 years ago at the Trinidad Hilton. Owen Baptiste, then editor-in-chief and general manager of the Express, posed the question: "What does the Express sell?" His answer was "Trust".
What reminded of that long-ago meeting was the survey results for the Trinidad Guardian, Power102 FM and Trinidad and Tobago Television. In the survey last September, Power 102 had commanded 12 percent of the market; by April this year, its share had slipped to a mere three percent.
The reason, of course, was the moving of Dale Enoch and Tony Lee to set up i92.5 FM, which has eight percent of the radio market. And, while it might seem that the popularity of Dale and Tony's morning show accounts for 102's drastic decline, I think there is another reason: a loss of trust in the station.
Dale and Tony, along with their boss Louis Lee Sing, left 102 because of interference by the station's owners, the Gillettes, in the station's news department. You cannot run a talk station if listeners do not believe that what they hear will be the truth; and the public's perception political inteference ensures that nobody believes what they hear - including the supporters of whichever party supposedly benefits from such interference.
It is for exactly this reason that TTT didn't even make a blip on the survey. But, to me, the most instructive results were those of the Guardian newspaper.
The daily Newsday led the market with 41 percent, while the daily Express has 38 percent. The Guardian trailed at 15 percent. The Sunday Express has 48 percent of newspaper readership, the Sunday Newsday has 33 percent, while the Sunday Guardian has a mere 19 percent.
What is telling here is the point at which the Guardian's decline began: in 1996, when managing director Alwin Chow and six editors resigned over interference by the paper's Board in the editorial department. As readers would recall, then Prime Minister Basdeo Panday had accused the Guardian editors of being racist (his main evidence being the headline "Chutney Rising") and the Board had issued a statement saying that it was not the paper's policy to antagonise the Government.
Curiously, although the Board had some inkling that the Guardian had lost credibility, they never made any serious attempt to rebuild its image. As the paper's slide continued over the next few years, the Guardian's Board was clearly convinced that their only problem was size. That, after all, was what the respondents on their surveys said they most disliked about the Guardian.
But this just showed the limitations of polls: what people say they think isn't necessarily what they do think. And, in any case, in the two years before the mass resignations, the Guardian's market share had actually been climbing.
I am not saying that newspaper readers decided not to buy the Guardian as a matter of principle. Ours is not a culture where average citizens act from such motives. But, somehow, the idea that the Guardian wasn't a good paper permeated through the society. But the Guardian's Board never grasped this subtle cause, so the paper first tried going downmarket (sex and superstition) and, when that failed, the company launched the Wire.
The strategy now is to go downmarket with the Wire and upmarket with the Guardian. In other words, get the dumb and working-class readers with the tabloid and the smart and upper-class ones with the broadsheet. To this end, the Guardian has been hiring writers (as distinct from reporters and journalists). It is the right strategy, since one thing writers bring to a paper is a trustworthy image. But the Guardian has hired these persons for the wrong reason, which is elitism; and the company hasn't even begun to deal with the issue which caused its decline in the first place: Board interference in editorial matters.
With perhaps the sole exception of Ken Gordon, business people in Trinidad and Tobago have not learned that practices which might work in other professions cannot work in media. Like banks, ours is a profession which rests on trust. Unlike banks, our success lies not in hiding information, but in giving it.
But the media nowadays is a good investment. The most watched television show is the TV6 News, more people are reading more newspapers than ever before, and the third most listened-to radio station is mainly talk. That heightened interest probably has a lot to do with the political bacchanal, so it is ironic that much of that bacchanal stems from the media's most prominent critic, Basdeo Panday.
It is also ironic that this heightened interest also lies in the media being one of the few institutions the public still has confidence in: and that confidence has a lot to do with the resignations of Chow, Sunity Maharaj, Maxie Cuffie, Pat Ganase, Vaneisa Baksh, Skye Hernandez and Robert Saunders six years ago. ALong with teh resignations from Radio 610 during the 1970 marches, this was the only time that leaders in an elite institution in this society had taken action on a matter of principle. That event marked a significant turning point in the ethos of our society, and helped deepen our democracy in unobvious ways.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh