Final salute to Newsday

2026-01-25 - 21:09

THERESE MILLS. Hers is the name many will remember first when they think of Newsday. She had already broken a glass ceiling, as the first woman to be editor in chief of a national daily newspaper. Then she took on a new assignment: founding editor in chief of Newsday, in 1993. She would lead a newsroom – along with another media giant, news editor John Babb – of distinguished journalists, photographers, sub-editors, paginators and columnists who dared to challenge those who felt the paper would not last a year. We made it to 32. And although those early editorial leaders are now gone, they passed on their passion for journalism to those under their charge who succeeded them. Newsday, under Daily News Ltd, was the vision of businessmen and managers who felt there was room for a third paper in TT. The paper forged forward, becoming number one in the market after five years. This was the People’s Paper at its height. Daring in its coverage of crime, politics and world events, Newsday also went into the hearts of communities to reach people and to tell their stories. That effort was shared with the public thanks to many people behind the scenes, whose names never appeared in its pages, but who worked diligently round the clock, every day of the year, though floods, storms, states of emergency, the pandemic. Press-room men, advertising clerks, distributors, darkroom technicians, proofreaders, the staff in marketing, accounts, HR, circulation, IT, vendors – all helped to bring Newsday into many thousands of households. Newsday even found itself on the front pages at times: perhaps most significantly, in defence of press freedom, when, in 2012, police searched the Port of Spain newsroom and a journalist’s home, after a report on a row between the Integrity Commission’s chairman and his deputy. The paper would not be silenced. Sadly, it now leads the way again, to the end. Newsday was the little paper that could. It stood alone, not beholden to region-wide conglomerate ownership. But editorial independence comes at a high cost: unlike its competitors, this newspaper had no financial cushion to fall back on. Like media houses around the world, it has been travelling through a new landscape, a digital world where readers spend five minutes scanning the news on their phones; and advertisers have fallen away. The newsroom and the paper adapted the way they ran, but it could not survive. It’s heartbreaking for the dedicated staff – especially those who gave their service for all of those 32 years – for Newsday’s journey to end at a liquidator’s door. But we salute those who built Newsday, and the readers who opened its pages daily, for decades, and say: Thank you for the honour of serving you.