Keep association ready to represent interests in changing times

VETERAN JOURNALIST Al Gilkes is encouraging fellow journalists to keep the Barbados Association of Journalist and Media Workers (BARJAM) fully functioning and ready to represent the best interests of media practitioners.

Delivering the feature address during a special general meeting at the headquarters of the National Union of Public Workers(NUPW), where the name of the Association was changed from the Barbados Association of Journalists (BAJ), Gilkes declared that media workers have a very difficult task ahead, as they now have to compete with the advent of social media.

“Your profession now is a very difficult one in this age of social media. People are not any longer willing to go by let’s wait and see what CBC [Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation] brings, let’s wait and read what The Nation brings, there is so much on the spot information, true or not true, which is available on WhatsApp and on whatever you are using.”

“You are driving, you are walking, you are on your toilet bowl, don’t care where you are, it’s readily available right there and then as it happens. So your professions are no longer the profession, which my profession was as a journalist where people waited on me until I got back,” he said.

The veteran journalist who has had an outstanding career, stressed that he was confident that if media workers in Barbados hold on to hope, and do not fall off, they would be able to withstand the distractions of social media, which is the biggest transformation in the history of journalism.

“With the other media, we don’t know where it’s going because it changes every day, we don’t know where it will end, but I believe that everything that goes around, comes back around.

“I believe that the day will soon come when enough people will start recognising that what is happening on social media isn’t in their best interest, you [have] to take it with a pinch of salt.”

“People are becoming aware of the fact that they are being misled, they are disseminating information which is causing other people to ask them what foolishness they are doing,” Gilkes said. (AH)