BY OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C. — While reorganizing my photo files, I came across a photo taken at a reception held during the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) convention at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. June 20 – 24, 2017, that prompted me to write this article.
I am pictured with Denise Rolark Barnes, Publisher of the Washington Informer, who was at the time Chair of the NNPA, and Dr. Benjamin Chavis, President and CEO of the NNPA, a trade association that represents more than 220 print and digital newspapers across the United States.
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 than 11 years (1982 – 1993), and even way back then I thought it made perfect sense for the powers-that-be with responsibility for promoting tourism to The Bahamas to advertise in the Black Press.
Back then, 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, Africans-Americans still strongly support black newspapers.
This has been the core aspect of my lobbying efforts in recent 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 in recent years 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 newspaper 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. 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 1997.
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.
The very strong Bahamas tourism performance in 2018 that continued into 2019 suggests that current Minister of Tourism Dionisio D’Aguilar and his leadership team at the Ministry of Tourism are obviously doing something right, but they should not rest on their laurels. Surely, 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.
The current Chair of the NNPA is Karen Carter Richards, Publisher of the Houston Forward Times, who was elected on June 28, 2019, during the NNPA annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. She succeeds Dorothy Leavell, Publisher of the Chicago and Gary Crusader Newspapers.
