Stabroek News was considered Guyana’s top newspaper. The country still has three other papers: one is state-owned and another is closely linked to the ruling party. The third one recently began asking its web visitors how willing they would be to pay to read online content.

Early Ward, a retired 76-year-old beverage company manager from Guyana, said he was depressed about the demise of Stabroek News.

“I have been reading newspapers since the 50s and prefer to have one in my hand to hold and to move around with and read anytime,” he said.

Ward now relies on TV and social media for news.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Newsday made its debut in 1993, promising to reach the most remote communities on the twin-island nation where two long-established rivals still operate: the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian and the Trinidad Express.

The paper appealed to blue-collar workers and soon became a household name as journalists scooped other news outlets on stories and lawmakers referenced its articles in Parliament.

Newsday was known for its coverage of Tobago, the smaller, less developed of the two islands, and for amplifying voices of those struggling, said Raymond, who served as editor-in-chief from 2017 to 2022.

She said one of the most fulfilling roles at the paper was helping people because “they are desperate and officialdom has not helped them and they don’t have anybody else to turn to.”

A status symbol

From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, newspapers in the Caribbean enjoyed solid financial backing and became a status symbol, said journalist Wesley Gibbings, vice president of the Jamaican-based Media Institute of the Caribbean.

“People would be seen walking with a physical copy of newspapers,” he recalled. “It was almost a prestigious thing to be the one with the newspaper.”

Then Big Tech platforms including Google began attracting advertising content and revenue while mining mainstream media content, Gibbings said.

“The danger signs have been up for a very long time,” he noted. “We are in a watershed period right now, and the crashes will continue.”

The windup of Daily News Limited, which published Newsday, was due to a “perfect storm of challenges,” said the company’s managing director, Grant Taylor, noting that print advertising fell by 75% over the last decade.

Raymond, who helped set up Newsday’s digital desk in early 2018, said perhaps Newsday “could have worked harder at broadening the revenue stream from online publications.”

In hindsight, she pondered whether transforming Newsday into a digital-only news outlet could have been a viable option. However, with Loop News, a regional online news source that closed last July, she said becoming a digital-only publication would not have guaranteed Newsday’s survival.

In the case of Stabroek News, its owners said the government paid “a mere” $7.5 million toward a debt of some $90 million owed for advertising services in the past year.

But the newspaper noted that overdue bills and a drop in government advertising are not the main reasons for its demise: “Readership patterns have changed dramatically, and fewer readers are willing to purchase printed editions — or even pay for electronic versions.”

In a recently published letter to Stabroek News, Lurlene Nestor mourned its closure, “especially during this period of Guyana’s history, where allegations of massive public corruption are rife, coupled with a situation where the nation’s important resources, such as gold and oil, appear to be either corruptly exploited or used as personal political bargaining chips.”

Anand Persaud, Stabroek News’ editor-in-chief, echoed those concerns, adding that he’s proud of the paper’s work.

“We leave at this stage,” he said, “because we want to make sure our independence is not on the line.

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Gibbs reported from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and Wilkinson from Georgetown, Guyana.

Dánica Coto, Anselm Gibbs And Bert Wilkinson, The Associated Press