The launch of Y103.3 (note: say dot, not point) symbolises so many positive things to me about the role of the media in unleashing our people’s creativity that I just had to rush in here and tell you about it.
Okay, let us dispose of the naysayers first: I have heard that some discussion is going on as to why this new station, a sister to SLAM 101.1, and part of the emerging Power Broadcasting group, is not playing more local music.
It is a false premise, because it submits the thesis that Barbadian enterprises should only create media products or services which are predominantly sourced from local materials.
This goes back to the old days of import substitution in manufacturing, which has produced very little of its own accord, because once you protect a market, the players in it need not worry about improving or keeping up with the times.
Why should they? Whatever they put out has to be bought anyway, no? Of course, in terms of the consumer, this opened Puerto Rico (imagine!) as the hot spot to shop a couple of decades ago, quickly replaced (thank God) by Miami. And it also sent the barrel trade through the roof.
Of course, we still have those stupid bound rates in effect, but they only help to fuel the import trade, whether all done legitimately or through a side door. In media, first SLAM and then now Y103 are entertaining listeners and making business and trade go around thanks to the results advertisers get from reaching their wide audiences.
Similarly, the arrival of M People magazine, with its focus on fashion and leisure, as well as a number of other lifestyle magazines, usually linked to impossibly expensive real estate and high-end sports like polo, also play their part in promoting Barbados and providing jobs for media people here, most of them actual Barbadians.
Along the way we also have the wonderful Porgie and Murda doing Crop Over material and insanely funny “sitcoms” which you can find on YouTube.
We also have talented young people sticking their own pennies together to produce dramatic movies. Pardon my Bajan but yuh t’ink it easy? It is not. These productions are mostly labours of love in the hope of financial gain somewhere down the road.
It is interesting to note that almost all of these new media products have come out of left field – not from the mainstream. I include in this round-up Barbados Today, which has embraced the digital platform (the Internet) as its sole means of distribution, not its secondary one.
The mainstream media here are suddenly playing catch-up.
The new media, like SLAM and Y103, have risen to the challenge by allowing you to access their offerings online via apps as well as over the traditional broadcast airwaves.
This is not a review of the content of any individual media product. I am more interested in the fact that we are building out – starting with the independent people and companies – a pretty diverse media business right here on our 166-square mile rock. I think it is quite impressive.
As someone said at Y103’s launch party last Wednesday, Barbadian audiences are very sophisticated. The person was talking radio, but I am sure they would agree that the comment extends to all other media.
I have the sense that the cumulative effect of all this is placing us on the cusp of a fully-fledged media/creative industry, where all sorts of video and music production can be undertaken and many radio and TV formats can flourish along with magazines and newspapers in both print and digital formats.
An industry which not only helps future stars of music, stage and screen to be born but provides good employment for the midwives of the process – all media workers, from reporters, photographers, producers, and script writers, to make-up artists, and all the other professions needed to support the sector.
Meantime, congratulations to Habib and Marian Elias – who are not limelight seekers, and may be aghast at my mentioning their names – for four great years of SLAM and hopefully many more for both that upstart and its new sister Y103.
They have not only changed the radio soundscape vastly for the better here in Barbados but have also played a major role in uplifting the media people who bring their station to life every day. I have never seen such a high level of professionalism coupled with unbridled joie de vivre as I see at these stations.
Along with Barbados Today, which, I may remind you, was the brainchild of the present editor-in-chief of the Nation family of publications, and which profited from his leadership, as it also did from reporting by this publication’s present editorial coordinator, who was its star reporter (in my view), and whose contribution is missed from its digital pages.
If a stock market only functions if people can buy and sell shares in companies freely, a creative media industry can only function properly where the talented people can come, stay or go as their professional career takes them.
That is why it was good to see executives and reporters from other media at the Y103 launch party. If we in the media cannot function as colleagues even if we are in competition with each other, then we will always be easy pickings for the special interests, like politicians, who profit by keeping us divided or at war with each other.
I am more excited than I have ever been to be working in the Barbados media. And you thought I was cynical.