Newsrooms around the world need to adopt measures to prevent their governments from manipulating media houses by using advertising as a means of reward or punishment. That was the contention at the final day yesterday of the International Press Institute (IPI) Congress at the Hyatt Regency, Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain.
The session, which was chaired by Jim Clancy, anchor and correspondent, CNN International, was entitled: "Manipulating the Media: Government advertising as a reward/punishment for media outlets." Highlighting his experience, Anand Persaud, editor-in-chief, Stabroek News, Guyana, said his paper was faced with the problem of interference by the Guyana Government, which resulted in a 15 per cent cut in advertising.
He said contingency measures had to be put in place as the Stabroek News had to operate with reduced revenues. He said the newspaper used the tools available to it and decided to publish monthly surveys showing government advertising distribution among Guyanese newspapers.
The publication of the surveys increased the public's confidence in the newspaper, which boosted its circulation, he said. He added: "I think the role of the newspaper is to stand up and fight for what you believe in. I think what our case shows is that you can stand up and actually fight back and win.
"Governments don't always win. They may try to get rid of you, but you can fight back.What we showed was that we were prepared to take them on comfortably. "One of the things we have never done is lay off people. We decided we needed to keep our family on board." Persaud said the Stabroek News had three options to come out of its financial challenges.
"The first was to go in the direction of e-commerce. We commercialised our Web site; we created an e-newspaper. Our advertising rates were not changed for about ten years, so we decided to change those," he said. A second option was to change the outlook of the newspaper and the third option was to keep readers of the Stabroek News abreast of government announcements.
