By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 8, 2021 – Although I am still struggling to avoid eviction because of back rent that I owe, I have decided to stop humiliating myself by publicly begging for financial assistance on Facebook.
However, now that the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism has increased its promotional efforts to remind the world-at-large that The Bahamas is still one of the world’s leading tourist destinations and is open for business, I hope that it will reconsider its decision to cancel a year-long agreement with my public relations company, THE BROWN AGENCY, to assist in promoting The Bahamas that was abruptly cancelled last December for reasons that are still baffling to me. I was told that they were cutting back on expenditure, but my agreement was only for $1,000 a month, and considering the public relations services THE BROWN AGENCY was rendering, I still find that reason hard to believe.
Nonetheless, I hope that Minister of Tourism Dionisio D’Aguilar and Director General of Tourism Joy Jibrilu revisit that decision and again employ my expertise as one of The Bahamas’ top journalists to help spread the word to potential visitors that IT’S STILL BETTER IN THE BAHAMAS.
Even before I started receiving a “small stipend” for promoting The Bahamas, given my strong connection to the Black Press in the United States, I incessantly appealed to the Ministry of Tourism to consider the importance of advertising in Black Press.
The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) is a federation of more than 200 Black community newspapers, with a combined readership of 15 million. The organization has forged ahead into the digital age with the creation of an electronic news service and the BlackPressUSA.com web site that enables the Black Press to provide real-time news and information to its national constituency.
Karen Carter Richards, Publisher of the Houston Forward Times, is the current Chair of the NNPA. She was elected in June of 2019, during the NNPA annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, succeeding Dorothy Leavell, Publisher of the Chicago and Gary Crusader Newspapers.
When I previously lived in Washington, D.C., for 21 years before returning to The Bahamas permanently in 1996, I was News Editor of the Washington Informer for more 12 years, and I became convinced that it made perfect senss shown with Karen Carter Richards, publisher of the Houston Forward Times and Chair of the NNPA.e for the powers-that-be with responsibility for promoting tourism to The Bahamas to advertise in the Black Press.
Years ago, most of The Bahamas’ advertisements specifically targeting African-Americans were placed in national magazines like Ebony and Black Enterprise, notwithstanding the fact that African-Americans have always strongly supported their community-based newspapers. What’s more, while many mainstream white newspapers continue to experience a drastic decline in readership as a result of technological advances that have changed how news is disseminated, African-Americans still strongly support black newspapers.
This has been the core aspect of my lobbying efforts over the years to convince the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism to advertise in the Black Press. Because of my past close ties to the Washington Informer, I have made more than one formal proposal to the Ministry of Tourism to consider advertising in publications like The Informer, which is widely circulated in the Washington metropolitan area.
Indeed, The Informer has a strong presence in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which has been enhanced by the fact that The Informer is the sponsor of the Prince George’s County Spelling Bee, through which a spelling champion from P.G. County is selected to participate in the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. The Informer is also the sponsor of District of Columbia Spelling Bee. As I noted in several previous articles on this subject, it was because of my previous ties to the Washington Informer that The Bahamas became a participant in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The late Dr. Calvin W. Rolark, as Publisher and Editor of The Washington Informer, applied for and won the right for his weekly publication to take over sponsorship of the District-wide Spelling Bee during the 1981-82 school year after the then sponsor, The Washington Daily News, was sold and eventually closed, leaving the D.C. Spelling Bee without a sponsor.
Subsequently, I attended my first Scripps Spelling Bee in 1984 and was so impressed that I made up my mind that whenever I returned to The Bahamas to live, I would seek to have the Scripps Bee inculcated into our education system. I succeeded in doing so when I was Editor of the Nassau Guardian in 1998.
Another “selling point” I have advanced in my lobbying efforts to convince the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism to advertise in The Informer is that there are many well-educated professional African-Americans living in the Washington metropolitan area who are either employed by the federal government or in the private sector with disposable income to be able to afford an annual vacation to a foreign country.
I stressed this point unsuccessfully on more than one occasion to then Minister of Tourism Obie Wilchcombe in the former Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) government. Mr. Wilchcombe was one of the featured speakers when the NNPA held its mid-winter meetings in Nassau in 2015, and he made a solemn promise to the publishers that advertising in African-American newspapers would be included in the next tourism budget. Of course, Mr. Wilchcombe did not keep that promise.
Unquestionably, current Minister of Tourism Dionisio D’Aguilar and his leadership team deserve a great deal of credit for the very strong Bahamas tourism performance in 2018 that continued into 2019, prior to Hurricane Dorian and the impact of the COVID-19 on the country.
It makes a whole lot of sense for them to target the potential bonanza of visitors that advertising in the Black Press certainly has the potential to produce for The Bahamas. Hopefully, they will see the wisdom in re-engaging the public relations services of THE BROWN AGENCY in spreading the word that The Bahamas has a long, rich history as one of the world’s top tourist destinations, with one of its islands, Bimini, just 50 from the Florida coast.
