THE BROWN AGENCY today is officially launching an online news publication, BAHAMAS CHRONICLE. Although we hope to develop a strong following in The Bahamas and the wider Caribbean, our major focus will be on keeping Bahamians and natives from other CARICOM countries in the Diaspora up-to-date on news from their respective countries.
I became acutely aware of the need for an online publication like BAHAMAS CHRONICLE during my interaction with Bahamians living abroad when I was Press, Cultural Affairs and Information Manager at The Bahamas Embassy in Washington, D.C. for four-plus years before my contract was terminated following the change of Government in The Bahamas in May of 2017.
During my tenure with the Embassy, I introduced a regular feature entitled BAHAMIANS IN THE DIASPORA, which we initially planned to publish on our website on a monthly basis, highlighting the achievements of noted Bahamians living abroad. It was my desire to continue doing something similar after I left the Embassy that hatched the idea in my mind to establish an online news publication.
As many of you are no doubt aware, numerous Bahamians have migrated to the United States over the years and there are sizable native-Bahamian populations in metropolitan areas of Florida, New York, California, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, where THE BROWN AGENCY is based. Given the advancements made in Internet technology, reaching the vast majority of the Bahamians in the world-wide Diaspora through this medium clearly should be easily accomplished. We hope to keep as many of them as possible informed of events occurring “back home.”
However, rather than just target Bahamians in the Diaspora, we decided that the BAHAMAS CHRONICLE should also publish news highlights from other countries in the Caribbean with a shared British colonial history. During my tenure at the Embassy, I routinely covered the Organization of American States (OAS) and got to know most of the diplomats from these countries and realized that Jamaica’s national motto, “Out of Many One People,” certainly applies to all the CARICOM-member countries that were once colonies of Great Britain.
In fact, if the West Indies Federation plan concocted by the British in 1958 to grant independence collectively to Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and some of its Leeward and Windward Islands had succeeded, Jamaica’s motto would indeed be very meaningful to far more people. But that plan collapsed because of the individual nationalistic leadership ambitions at the time of powerful politicians in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados.
Eventually, Jamaica became an independent nation on August 6, 1962, Trinidad and Tobago followed on August 31, 1962, and Barbados became independent on November 30, 1966. Along with Guyana, which gained its independence from Great Britain on May 26, 1966, these four former British colonies were the founding members of CARICOM on August 1, 1973
Of course, The Bahamas was still politically controlled by a white-minority government until the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) won the historic January 10, 1967 general election and the first predominant black government came to power. The Bahamas eventually gained its independence from Great Britain on July 10 , 1973 and became a member of CARICOM on July 4, 1983.
It stands to reason that the 15 full members of CARICOM, based on regional and political priorities, do not always unanimously agree on all issues addressed by the 35 independent states of the Americas that comprise the OAS. However, hopefully for the most part Jamaica’s “Out of Many One People” motto will be the guiding light for BAHAMAS CHRONICLE in reporting on matters of importance to natives in the Diaspora from all of these countries.
As a matter of policy, we will not publish CRIME news because we do not consider CRIME to be news. Likewise, political news will be vetted and filtered to eliminated scandals, rumours and information disguised as news that tend to be the standard practice among the daily print media in The Bahamas.
We should note, however, that we will not be competing with the established news publications in The Bahamas and CARICOM countries. In fact, most or our news informing our readers in the Diaspora of matters occurring in their countries will be compiled from newspapers in those countries. We will, of course, have original commentaries and some feature articles on topics we think may be of interest to our readers.
I would like to publicly thank my very talented wife Elisabeth Ann Brown, Vice President and Creative Director of THE BROWN AGENCY, for the yeoman job she did in getting this project off the ground. Our start-up budget did not allow us to utilize the services of a professional web designer, so Elisabeth used her considerable creative skills to produce this website for BAHAMAS CHRONICLE. Click on bahamaschronicle.com to see the results of her efforts.
Since advertisements are the lifeblood of any news medium, we hope that potential advertisers would take advantage of our very reasonable advertising rates, which we shall be happy to provide you with if you contact us at this email address: otbrown242@gmail.com.
