Hard times at The Voice (#132)
Posted on | November 19, 2009 | 1 Comment
Tough times at The Voice newspaper…again.
Editorial staff at Britain’s only remaining newspaper aimed at an Afro-Caribbean readership, are bracing themselves for yet another round of redundancies.
This will be approximately the fourth or fifth round of redundancies in as many years.
Difficult times for all print media, and a difficult to place product, have taken its toll on the finances of the Jamaica Gleaner owned newspaper.
Questions are again being asked as to whether the paper has a future.
But The Voice has been here many times before.
Despite its role in producing some of Britain’s best journalists, writers and broadcasters, it has struggled to achieve economic success. At the same time, it has outlasted all of its competitors- most recently the New Nation.
Tough times is part of its foundation.
There is no doubt, however, that there remains a need for a media outlet that can voice the aspirations, dreams, hurt, and frustrations of Britain’s black community.
Whether such an outlet is best placed in a newspaper format continues to be debated.
Comments
One Response to “Hard times at The Voice (#132)”
Leave a Reply
November 19th, 2009 @ 2:57 PM
You’re last sentence really hits the nail on the head. News media is radically changing due in part to the rise of the net and things like new media. Newspapers are fast becoming a relic of former communications age; basically they have to adapt or die.
The antidote to the above is a campaign to make sure the black community is represented online as never before, the community needs to surpass its current web interests and engage in blogs such as this but also join the conversation on things like Twitter, it needs to comment and create news, local news especially, online. It needs to make its digital voice heard loud and clear.
Once that cultural shift happens there will a vibrant market for online news focused on the black community.