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Samuel Allen, Jr. and His
Pursuit
of Staying Power with St Martin Internet News
By Lasana M.
Sekou
GREAT BAY, St.
Martin (December 15, 2011) – Samuel Allen, Jr. is a
broadcaster who appears to be on the verge of making
Internet news media history in St. Martin. For the
second consecutive year, Allen’s
SXMIslandTime
has won the SHTA Pineapple Award for Outstanding
Journalism (2011). There is more going on here than
Allen distinguishing himself as the only media
representative to pick up a second award at one of the
island’s premiere star-studded affairs.
Allen founded the
news website in February 2008. “I had ideas to create my
own online news portal and with the help of local
experts like Greg Richardson and Alvin Prescod I have
managed to take it to where it is today,” said Allen.
The online publisher/editor/reporter is also the news
director at PJD2 radio and will celebrate his 25th
anniversary at the station in 2012. At
SXMIslandTime,
improvements in writing style still have to catch up
with the up-to-the-minute newsbreaks and fast-paced
daily posting of news and information on the site.
This writing issue
– spelling, grammar, punctuation, attribution, context –
is a language teacher’s nightmare and terrifies some
readers of blogs, news, and other information websites
all over the world. Traditional media with online
editions, The Daily Herald and Today of St. Martin
included, still fare better with online content writing
and attributed sources. “I’m working on that too,” said
Allen. His PJD2 news track record could have something
to do with the growing reliability being earned for his
site from its “visitors.”
We “Get It” Online
SXMIslandTime
is not the lone wolf, nor is it without competition for
publishing serious St. Martin news and information on
the World Wide Web. On an island of just over 80,000
people (including unregistered folks), the general
population is arguably computer and Internet savvy,
according to computer expert Percival Cocks. Online
information activities are very visible. There is “Don
Ricardo” over at Arts Video Studios toughing it out with
camera and editing productions, and AVS TV news driving
the company’s multimedia portal,
avsnewsonline.com.
SMN-news.com sits
front row with the traditional print and broadcast press
corps at government and police news briefings in Great
Bay and Marigot.
Retired educators
like Camille Baly and Leopold Baly are bloggers who
still have a lot to say. Youngsters are virulent on
Facebook (FB), Youtube, and Soundcloud with “whatever”
and “what have you” messages, from the murky, to the
meleerosa, to the meaningful—and these young people have
banged a savage dent into email use (a worldwide email
phenomenon).
Environmental and
heritage FB profiles, of the professional and popular
varieties, have become virtual community archives—at
least one with 5,000 Friends. One FB community page has
over 9,000 Like fans. The websites of individuals,
businesses, and foundations proliferate, some just
putter. Intermittent web radio “stations” and webcasts,
and political exposé sites originating on the island or
from St. Martiners in the Netherlands and elsewhere are
streaming online like the proverbial nobody’s business.
There are numerous
tourism e-zines and chat rooms, active and inert, some
with scary inaccuracies, exotic fallacies, and racist
lies like the persistent tagging of the Caribs as
cannibals (but then some of our schools are still
teaching that to our children). There are throngs of
“BB”-adept individuals, and iPhone owners, who, while
stuck in the midday sun-blazed traffic on Cole Bay hill
or “wherever,” can blast a media or personal message or
image online to hundreds, even thousands island-wide . .
. and beyond. In fact, the general public voted for
SXMIslandTime
and the other candidates for the Pineapple Awards
online.
“Well, to tell you
the truth, St. Martin is Internet savvy from a social
networking point of view, because of the popularity of
Facebook, MSN Messenger, and Twitter,” said Cocks. High
tech has not stopped certain aspects of the nation’s
culture from working its “roots” into the matter.
“Because of our culture, word-of-mouth has remained the
main part of what caused the social network to explode”
on the island, said Cocks.
Cocks is keen to
make this point. It is not a dominance of product spin
marketing, personal research by a lot of homebodies, nor
a few tech review wizards leading flocks of
techno-peasants through flogs, blogs, and other assorted
journals, nor is it a B2B follow fashion of machines
“talking” to machines, but good old-fashioned
word-of-mouth that is currently driving the high tech
explosion of Internet usage in St. Martin.
“Word-of-mouth,
like it does with many other things in St. Martin, can
make or break you, and this is why” certain social
networking services and websites, applications and
gadgets, devices and downloads are selected
significantly over others and used in greater numbers
island-wide, according to Cocks. So when Allen said that
winning the award on November 18 “was like everybody
shouting at the same time: ‘THANK YOU! We appreciate
your work,’” he was not far from the mark of meaning it
“culturally.”
Hits and Visits
“When we started in
2008, the first month we had 32,000 hits,” said Allen.
In April 2011,
SXMIslandTime received over 12 million hits and
113,047 “number of visits,” the highest monthly for the
year to date. Hits are not as reliable, and are actually
a less accurate counting measure than “visits,”
“sessions,” “number of visits,” or “unique visitors.”
November comes in fourth place this year with 101,118
“number of visits” and 27,842 “unique visitors.”
December 5, 2011 registered the highest daily amount for
the month so far with 3,195 “number of visits.”
By the end of the
year,
SXMIslandTime will have likely received over 1
million “number of visits” and 308,945 “unique
visitors.” DExplorers.com, using cPanel, Inc. software,
offers some figures that are even more interesting for
both the chatterbox and the business-minded to toss
around. Leading the top 25 countries and territories
with the most visitors to
SXMIslandTime
in November 2011, are St. Martin, the USA, the
Netherlands, and, a comparatively distant fourth,
France.
The hits and
“visited pages” for Saba, Statia, Bonaire, and Curacao
were collapsed in the St. Martin (South) figures. These
territories are still grouped together in various online
tallying agencies and registries as the Netherlands
Antilles. Figures for the North of St. Martin were
grouped with the stats showing France as “point of
origin.” The Caribbean country visiting the St. Martin
news site the most is Antigua & Barbuda, at number 7.
Language may not be much of a hindrance for visitors to
the site from the Dominican Republic, registering at
number 14 with 26,343 hits—only Antigua & Barbuda and
Aruba were ahead of it in the region with more hits and
“visited pages.”
There were more
pages “visited” from China than from Guadeloupe, but
Guadeloupe registered more hits than China and nearly
800 less than Jamaica. Canada stood at number 6 with
43,687 “pages visited” in November. A critical
comparison between the leading news and information
websites on the island, and an analysis of content and
the relationship with their readership could be worthy
of a PhD study in modern Caribbean media use, technology
transfer, agenda setting, and the like.
Trending Now
The homegrown
online media phenomenon is rearing and roaring like a
massive tropical storm along the nation’s news and
information highways. The print media in St. Martin
refuse to be dislodged any time soon, especially for
news reliability. Radio still rules the airways. In the
1990s, there were notable international pundits
predicting that by 2000 there would be a global print
media wipe-out—at least in the world’s major cities—because of the online flood of revolutionary media
technology.
Interestingly, it
was in that same predicted year, at a Stanford Institute
for Economic Policy Research discussion, that Marshall
Loeb, a print media veterano, held the fort. “Print
media,” he said, “cannot compete with the speed of
online news services, so print will have to adjust by
providing more in-depth analysis.” Newspapers have since
taken to the Internet in droves with online editions.
As for
broadcasting, noted Loeb, the former editor of Fortune
and Money magazines, it “is as fast as the Internet but
not as interactive,” so he predicted that “broadcasting
will become more sensationalistic in order to compete.”
(SR, 3.15.2000) So what does the future hold for Allen,
for his web venture, and for news media use in St.
Martin? “I think it will continue its current trend with
online and radio news sources being the first go-to
source for information. Interactive sources like
SXMIslandTime
will continue to gain popularity,” said Allen.
Meanwhile the
Internet news venture is also a business. Allen remains
dogged about getting advertisers to connect with the new
media and remain as consistent as he is with reporting
and up-to-the-minute online news and information for the
public both at home and abroad.
There’s more going
on here, too, with the difficulty in securing
advertisers within each territory or island-wide. While
easier today than 50 years ago, getting ads still has
much to do with political power, race, and fear of
speaking out or writing (NB: anonymous letters to the
editor) which can lead to losing one’s job or business,
or not getting a particular job or contract; it has to
do with who controls what sectors of the economy, and
what and who a journalist or the media dare to report or
editorialize on critically. This is especially true when
there is an “issue” with, for example, the firing of
hotel workers and not identifying the hotel owners by
name or pictures, the spoiled-rotten golden goose of
tourism, corruption, racism, language of instruction and
its relationship to school failure rates, or, heaven
forbid, independence for St. Martin (South and North).
And the
ad-challenged areas probably have nothing to do with any
St. Martin exceptionalism. Nevertheless, Allen, as a
relatively new media owner/publisher, will have to
smartly tough it out through the establishment and the
advertising minefield like the forebears of his trade:
Broechie Brouwer, José Lake, Sr., Joe Lake, Jr., and
such battlers. Who’s to say how he will fare in
confronting the challenging areas, some still so taboo
that too many will say, or pretend, that they are “not
even there fo’ true.”
Advertising revenue
is key to being able to employ journalists and other
media related workers, and to being able to afford
and provide competitive services. “I have to say a
special thanks also to Gromyko Wilson who has stood by
me through thick and thin with his paparazzi-style
pictures,” said Allen about the media networking that he
too has come to rely on. The newsman is cognizant of the
relationship between mass media and freedom of
expression in society. The basic philosophy that guides
him is a standard but pivotal one. “Don’t make the news,
report the news,” said Allen.
Allen has come a
long way since his St. Maarten Academy high school days;
his music DJ stint at PJD2 in 1987; his training in
Barbados with the Caribbean Publishing and Broadcasting
Association in 1998; and his Radio Netherlands Training
Center course in St. Martin, under the auspices of the
Bureau Telecommunicatie en Post. Heading into a fourth
year of non-stop, day and night news posting at
SXMIslandTime,
with a shortage of advertising revenue, continuing use
of the media website by a public that is “not easy,” and
with abundant access to a full range of sophisticated
personal, group, island, regional, and international
Internet media at the fingertips of this readership,
Samuel Allen, Jr., is positioned to be a leader apart in
the development of Internet news media for the first
Internet-savvy generation of St. Martin.
Photo caption: St. Martin
broadcaster Samuel Allen, Jr. (C), at recent social
event in the Dominican Republic. Contact: Samuel Allen,
Jr
samuelallensxm@gmail.com Philipsburg, St.
Martin Caribbean Tel (721) 554-7089 Email:
Offshoreediting@gmail.com
posted 16 December 2011
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W. E. B. Du Bois’
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