Dear Editor,
Stabroek News, a privately owned daily newspaper, named after a historic district of Georgetown, was launched on the initiative of David DeCaires and Miles Fitzpatrick, enlightened and eminent legal practitioners, and Mrs. Doreen DeCaires. After nearly four decades on the newsstands, the publication of the popular Stabroek News will cease on March 15, 2026. Mr. Anand Persaud has been the Editor of the newspaper. The publishing company of Stabroek News will be liquidated and a staff of 60 will be relieved of their employment. The announcement of the closure was made by Chairman of the Company, Mr. Brendan DeCaires and Isabelle DeCaires and diminishing circulation and revenues are the main reasons cited for the termination of the paper. The current Government’s implicit hostility in failing to honour a debt to the newspaper of $84.4 million simply compounded the financial difficulties.
A newspaper, in all its multi functions, is a vital current expression and even guardian, of the values, culture and soul of a nation and records not only the day’s events but is there as an archive from which history can be easily retrieved. When the Stabroek News was published in November 1986, it was consistent with such attributes. But it also emerged with a discrete publication persona, and as an invaluable contribution of another dimension to our reading experience. It was not coincidental that it was birthed in an age of decline and degradation, when freedom of expression lived precariously. And a year after another fraudulent elections, demeaning of the integrity of a Guyana already mired in despair. But it was also the age of resistance, it was not just a faithful reporter of the latest news headline, but an opinion maker in its own right and a haven of the contrary non- conformist view.
Those engaged in its publication have every reason to be proud of its adherence to the criteria for high quality journalism, of its heroic nearly four decades of existence and service to Guyana. We, its grateful readers, would be as proud as well, as despairing and stunned, ruminating over a void that ensues with the closure of this newspaper. The country in this critical phase of its history can ill afford the loss of an institutional defence against unbridled power and suppression of information. The newspaper is not a foreign owned business nor was it begun as an operation of local big business, nor was it beholden to any special interest or a political party or the State. It helped to see the Guyanese struggle for fair and free elections succeed in the end, itself a daring intervention in our politics of domination and control. Its striking fidelity to fearless free and independent journalism was its fundamental commitment.
A particular feature of Stabroek News, we overseas readers, in particular, will surely miss is the weekly column of Alissa Trotz: ‘In the Diaspora,” thoughtful of the concerns, interests and issues related to Guyanese abroad and the Caribbean. While in the tortured divisive loyalty driven politics of Guyana, Stabroek News would not have been everyone’s first choice for the kitchen table, the newspaper was indeed quite popular and found a true durable niche in newspaper readership. Stabroek News has finally fallen because of the changing nature of readership preferences in the digital age and its inability to defy the inexorable laws of private enterprise. I hope that concerned Guyanese may find the resources to keep it alive in some way.