Dear Editor,
I was intrigued to see the announcement for ‘Kiskadee Watch’. Guyanese home and abroad badly need an objective digital newspaper. This is not it.
Where to begin? The EiC took a ship-the Stabroek News-well afloat and respected for decades and drove it into the rocks.[1] Misreading the zeitgeist did not help neither the slow payment by the government.
The advisory board is stacked with non-journalists. At least two of them live far away from the motherland and are virulent ‘anti-oilers’. They would leave the Guyanese people poor rather than monetise the national offshore gift. A third regularly swallows dictionaries and refashions them as elegant attacks on the elected government. Day after day on several platforms
So, objective they are not.
Where are the distinguished citizens of the nation on that board. Absent.
As to fund raising, The Guardian has only just cracked the begging bowl strategy after ten years. The funds raised though never seem to be enough for the great multi-nation investigation of the Alan Rusbridger era. And NPR, another begging bowl media outlet, is struggling too. One of Trump 2.0’s first moves was to financially cripple PBS, NPR and the International services like the Voice of America. Too often now their begging bowls are empty.
I say bonne chance to those who sail the good ship Kiskadee but they will need deep individual pockets and a wider agenda to avoid a second shipwreck!