IN my assessment yesterday (Sunday) as to why the Stabroek News (SN) is facing extinction, I did state that the factors in the SN situation were different from those of Kaieteur News (KN) but did not elaborate. Here now is my outline as to why the KN is comatose.

Of course, I will avoid the obvious – the online technology and social media are killing the global print media. A print media outfit is a huge multi-million undertaking and is expensive to sustain. A sophisticated online news entity can be produced by an experienced group of journalists with no fancy expenses. We are seeing that in every country, without exception.

The factors that led to the demise of SN are completely different from those that are responsible for KN’s demise. The two newspapers started in completely different circumstances. SN was born out of the changing class structure of Guyana, and relied on that class structure for its existence. The details of this discussion need not detain us here, as they are boldly described in yesterday (Sunday)’s piece.

KN started as a modest project with money being hard to come by. It was the brainchild of Glen Lall, who simply felt he wanted Guyana to have a different type of newspaper from that of the SN. It began as a typical, wildish, sensationalist tabloid. That type of format made it popular with the working people, the poor rural folks, and certain sub-cultures in Guyana.

As its popularity grew exponentially, its interest began to diversify. It wanted to break out into hard news and political news. It succeeded in this direction, and its complement of experienced journalistic staff made that direction successful. Together with crime reporting and analysis of government, power and politics, KN became a mainstream newspaper.

It began to outsell SN because it reached a wider cross-section of people. KN reached its apogee in the era of the Buxton massacres between 2002 and 2006.The paper literally was the only source of information about the nuances, angles and mysteries of Guyana’s crime madness.

As the crime spree abated, KN began to lose some of its popularity, but not in a way to jeopardise the newspaper’s existence. The threat to the newspaper came from the psychic transformation of its owner, Mr. Glenn Lall. Around 2010, Mr. Lall, who, from the inception was prepared to accept ownership but let the newspaper be run by journalists, decided that he wanted to control the contents of the newspaper.

It is a complex story to describe, but Mr. Lall felt that KN had made him a superstar, and he was no longer prepared to remain behind the scenes and let his staff carry the newspaper. What happened from 2010 onwards was that Mr. Lall saw the newspaper as the vehicle to push his personality, ego and national status. In other words, Mr. Lall felt that he had become a powerful figure in Guyana, and he wanted to use the newspaper to stamp his image on Guyana.

It was a disaster in the making. Mr. Lall was hardly familiar with the dimensions of intellectual endowments, had no experience in journalism, and was not good at all in his relationship with the different aspects of the Guyanese society. Two things took over the soul of Mr. Lall, and he infused the newspaper with those impositions – one was a crazed obsession with the PPP/C government, and secondly, the oil industry.

The KN was about these two things. Crime reporting that made it a household name was no longer a priority. The paper began to lose its mainstream image and competent staff. Those who stayed no longer had faith in the newspaper and showed no interest in rekindling the spark. The KN began to go down because its wealthy owner had become autocratic and irrational.

Mr. Lall began to tell journalists what he wanted to go into the newspapers and in a majority of cases it was not journalistic material. The paper descended to the worst levels ever seen in a glossy, gossipy, sensationalist tabloid.

The result was that the newspaper received more libel writs than any other newspaper in the entire world, totalling over a hundred. Believe it or leave it– over a hundred in which the court losses totalled over a hundred million dollars. In a modest economy like Guyana’s, that is bound to kill a newspaper.

Unlike the SN, where the changing social structure of Guyana rendered it irrelevant, the KN died because of one-man rule. There are simply no other factors to attribute to the fall of KN except the dominance of its wealthy owner. Today, the KN barely sells its print edition. Its superstar days are dead and gone.    

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspape