Moving to JBC

Karen Blair, Features Writer

While James enjoyed working at the Gleaner Company, his salary wasn't enough to adequately provide for his family.

"I was married and had responsibilities. I sought an increase of $1,200 per year, but was told by the editor and financial controller it just wasn't possible. My first wife then thought it was time to move on if we were to survive as a couple. I was being wooed by the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) and, while I didn't really want to go, I decided to take up the offer", James recalls.

It was 1983 and, after approximately a year of negotiations passed, James finally accepted the position of chief editor for JBC Radio, with a mandate to understudy Consie Walters as the director of news. It wasn't all smooth sailing, however, for the young outspoken Owen James.

"At the time, there were some issues that concerned me and I spoke out about them. Of course, this landed me in major trouble and set back my career for about two years", says James.

However, the team of managers that hired James left, and he was promoted to director of news for radio and, later, assistant director for news - radio and television. James' career would skyrocket from this point, with the advent of Ulric Simmonds as general manager, or director-general as he was then called.

"I decided to introduce new ideas", he says. "I'm from the country and I realised that while print had rural correspondents, electronic media made it seem as if only Kingston existed. In 1986, I began having talks with my superiors about establishing a rural correspondent network. I was given carte blanche and I recruited 13 correspondents to cover the parishes".

The team included the late Ruth Coombs, Vando Palmer, Ken Neita, Leo Lambert and Clyde McKenzie. The rural correspondents network was so well established that very soon James was asked to breakfast by a competitor at RJR.

"She asked me the secret to the success", a smiling James recollects, 'but I didn't give it to her".

The secret, he now divulges, was nothing fancy; no numbers, no charts, but a simple fact.

"The secret was treating people right", he says. "My team knew that I cared because of how I treated them. We didn't have a lot of money to pay them, but if I was in a management meeting and Mrs Coombs from St Catherine or Mr Neita from Westmoreland came for their cheques, I would leave the meeting and walk the cheques through the system to ensure that neither left 5 South Odeon Avenue without their hard-earned money".

Encouraged by the success of the rural correspondents network, James turned his sights to bigger challenges.

Building the news team

"I told the then general manager, Ulric Simmonds, that I wanted to build a news team. Not a regular team, but one made of hardened people who really wanted to be in the profession. I laid out my plan to recruit them in a different way. I didn't want them to go to the personnel offices first. I wanted to be the first point of contact. I devised an aptitude test and my late friend, Carl Stone, tweaked it for me. This is what I used to interview the candidates".

From 77 interviewees, James soon had his team of seven persons. The team included Yvette Rowe, Mark Thomas, Mary Bailey, Joylene Griffiths, Carole Beckford and Sandra Falconer, whom he employed as a production assistant.

"That news team was hard-hitting. They worked extremely hard and showed real journalistic guts in covering Hurricane Gilbert and the general elections", James fondly remembers.

"JBC was government-owned and had shown significant improvement in terms of credibility, aided by no overt political interference from the Seaga administration and, after the 1989 general elections, I was a bit uncertain."

James says that uncertainty was short-lived.

"When the new prime minister, Michael Manley, introduced a bipartisan board to JBC, I thought it was a major and positive change from the 1970s."

Michael Manley's former press secretary, Claude Robinson, became general manager of JBC and, though ideologically we


were poles apart, professionally we were at one, and Robinson and the board appointed me director of news for radio and television in the mid-1990s after the bright young journalist, Cliff Hughes, left the station. Their mandate was simple: "Be professional".

For James it was an opportunity for growth.

The news team headed by James also developed the programme 'A Ray of Hope' which, 15 years later, is still aired during the nightly news on TVJ on Mondays.

"I remember sitting at home one weekend, watching the news, and I had an epiphany. That Monday during my usual editorial meeting, I told my team that we also needed stories of hope and inspiration on television and not just crime, politics and despair. A member of the editorial team scoffed at the idea, stating that it wasn't news, but I flexed my muscles and mandated journalist Carol Francis (one of my protégées) and another team member to start the programme. To their credit, they did an excellent job, executing the new idea with great flair and enthusiasm".