Hartley Neita, Contributor

When the Press Association of Jamaica asked me last week to say when I started working in the news media, it was only then I realised that this was the profession in which I have been involved my entire adult life.

I was never employed by any of the private sector media. I have either been commissioned by these organisations to write articles for them or I have submitted articles and short stories which they thought were good enough to publish. Interestingly, there were times when I earned more from these ventures than from my main job with the Government.

During some of my years of involvement in the news media, I worked full-time in the public sector, in the former Government Public Relations Office which later became the Jamaica Information Service. I was also invited to take on assignments with the Jamaica Tourist Board and Things Jamaican, and, whatever successes I had in these organisations could be traced to my experience as a communicator and the discipline this experience taught me.

The news media landscape has changed dramatically from the early years of my involvement. Today, there are some 20 radio stations, a number of television stations, and two dailies and a weekly newspaper. In those early years there was one daily newspaper, two or three weekly and monthly magazines, and a little bit of news on the one radio station. There were no radio talk shows with the hosts parading themselves as journalists.

Professional approach

Indeed, looking back in time, it seems to me that journalists were more professional in their approach to work than they are today. At that time, they were rarely given by-lines - i.e. their names as the author of the story published. Now, a youngster starts as a reporter today with our newspapers and is immediately given a by-line.

Another change today is the preponderance of women who are now working with the news media organisations and their sister-agencies, the public relations companies. The only woman who was on the staff of The Gleaner, when I started writing for this newspaper, was the secretary to the editor. Then some time during the 1950s a number of women joined the staff - Barbara Goodison (Gloudon), Gertrude Sherman, Sybil Campbell, Sylvia Lee, Doreen Bryan (Brown), Amoy Kong Quee, Aimee Webster, and Rose McFarlane, to name a few. Radio Jamaica had a long-serving news editor, Janet Mowatt and later Jennifer Grant.

These women soon discovered that to gain acceptance in what was a male-dominated system they had to learn to swiggle QQs at the bar counters of Dirty Dick and Jamaica Arms, and of course the Press Club.

The major change, however, has been the technology. Reporters, male and female, had to know then how to write shorthand. Now they use tape recorders. News rooms had telephones on the desks of the editor and the news editor, only. The rest of the staff shared two or three extensions. The noise level was high. Typewriters click-clacked constantly. Now they use silent computers.

Reporters had to depend on their memories or the organisation's libraries to access background information for the stories they wrote. Now, a press of the computer's mouse and that information appears on their computer screens.

News nature

What I find interesting is the changing nature of what is news. Up to the 1960s, The Gleaner had reporters at the airports and every day there were reports of who were traveling by plane and to where.

And, the names of every person attending funerals and cocktail parties were published. And woe to the reporter if he left out a name; the editor would be called and the reporter would find himself at his desk and roundly toasted. Another interesting nature of what was published was the list of the gifts of silver and crystal received by high society's brides and grooms, not the list of lemonade sets received by the humble and ordinary.