GENERAL Manager of Television Jamaica (TVJ) Kay Osborne has spearheaded a local programming initiative that has made the local television opration the undisputed leading television network and content provider in Jamaica.

She was appointed to the position by then chairman of TVJ, Lester Spaulding, back in 2004, returning to Jamaica with considerable experience gained from Fortune 500 companies. Spaulding sought her out for her leadership and management skills. Ebony Magazine named her among the leading black women in Corporate America and she received the Pillsbury Award for outstanding international business leadership among executive women in the United States.

Osborne graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in communications from the United States’ prestigious Northwestern University. She later earned a master’s degree in international business from the University of the West Indies (Jamaica).

Her role entails providing leadership and direction for TVJ’s overall performance and anchoring decisions on programming and on viewer engagement measures. She evaluates the company’s attributes, systems and procedures and determines those that can be leveraged to generate competitive advantage.

She declared that her overarching goal was to become the dominant market player and to accomplish this, she set about putting in place the right leadership team, an engaged workforce, an on-screen environment that was distinctive and of high quality which could deliver one million viewers a day. She saw it as vital that programming be underpinned by nation-building values which could deliver appropriate ROI and ROEE. Seven years on, there can be little doubt that her mission has been accomplished.

Top ranking

Today she points to the fact that TVJ has attained the number one rank of free to air stations with 66 per cent market share, more than 30 per cent than its nearest rival CVM. TVJ has 36 per cent of the television market despite the 200 foreign cable channels now being broadcast in Jamaica. The number one ranked foreign cable channel has only 7.33 per cent of the total Jamaican television market.

For decades local television was dominated by imported content. Osborne set about changing that and made Jamaicans look and be entertained by themselves.

The Contender, Magnum Kings and Queens of Dancehall, Digicel Rising Stars, Hidden Treasures and Nyammins drive ratings and are all locally created and produced.

Speaking with Caribbean Business Report from Beverley Hills earlier this week, Osborne said, “Seven years ago the main prime time programme broadcast immediately following the news was a dysfunctional soap opera called The Bold and the Beautiful. This was the main entertainment diet for the country from Monday to Friday.

“When I first mooted the idea of local programming to various television executives, I was told three things: 1) Jamaican businesses would not support local programmes ; 2) Jamaicans did not want to see themselves on prime time; and 3) we did not have the capacity to create high quality local content that would be interesting to Jamaicans who were now accustomed to the high quality production values that they got on cable.

“Well, we developed a strategy where we would have a portfolio of prime time local programmes, moving the foreign programmes out of prime time and replacing them with local content. For example we moved The Bold and the Beautiful to late evening and kept pushing it back later and later until next month it will be off the platform completely. Now remember that it was coming from being our ace prime time performer.”

TVJ’s general manager is of the view that the tactical move in the eighties, nineties and into the new millennium was to earn revenues and grow audiences quickly. While this may garner results in the short term, it was clear to Osborne that Jamaica should begin to develop an industry and that Jamaicans could see themselves on television in live and living colour and not just as criminals, villains and unsavoury characters but rather as performers to be acknowledged. To her that was an important aspect of nation building.

Today she is pleased to acknowledge that her team has proven wrong the naysayers that said it could not be done. TVJ is now all about high quality values and a cadre of top class producers.

Partnerships

Osborne has sought to form innovative deals which see TVJ partnering with producers in a variety of ways; sometimes as minority partners, other times as 100 per cent owners and even leveraging its resources for programmes where it does not have an equity position, as was the case with Hidden Treasures and Nyammins.

In more recent years Digicel Rising Stars has become a standard-bearer for TVJ and in this instance it is a minority partner. Here it shares the expenses and the revenues (both sponsorship and voting revenues).

How has the media landscape changed?

Osborne has seen discernible changes on the media landscape as it has become more competitive. She notes that a decade ago print was very dominant in terms of its influence with decision-makers and so was a mainstay for advertisers.

“A decade ago TVJ and CVM were neck and neck with only 3 percentage points between them, with cable being just a minor player. In terms of quality, TVJ’s product was mixed. Today, that has changed. TVJ has become the dominant entity reaching a million viewers every single day. Television is by far the most dominant media platform in Jamaica today. There is now a shift toward television which is driven by TVJ,” declared Osborne.

TVJ has now segmented its offerings and is looking to cover all bases. The mothership is TVJ, then there is TVJSN which is its sports network (Osborne is also its general manager), two cable channels which are RE-TV and the twenty-four hour news network, JNN. Then of course it has its radio offerings, which is RJR, not to mention its multimedia arm.

There is a growing concern that today Jamaican media is in the hands of a rarefied elite who use it to protect their interests and push their own agenda, and that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to practise good journalism for fear of treading on the wrong toes. Earlier this month the head of the Jamaica Labour Party’s youth arm G2K, Delano Seiveright, raised eyebrows by denouncing People’s National Party sympathisers and agents operating under the guise of impartial journalists and vowed to out them. He is calling on all journalists to declare their political affiliation. What does Osborne make of all this?

“Nothing ramps up charges of media bias more than an impending election. With the general election around the corner, it is now the silly season in terms of the criticism of the media. In Jamaica we are seeing that the media is your friend when it reports information that politicians believe is in their interest. Then it becomes a different story, and the media is clearly bias, when it reports information that you believe doesn’t work for you. Media in Jamaica is ranked by people who pay attention to these things. But it must be said that we generally have a free press which is highly ranked internationally. Both the media and politicians need to pay attention to this.

“There is a multiplicity of voices in media that will provide some balance and fairness. Now what needs to happen is that the person or organisation charging a media house or reporter with bias must go and do the content analyses and provide the data that says here is the information that supports my charge of bias. This then validates a held position. It is insufficient to simply make an assertion of bias. As media consumers, we read the Jamaica Observer, we read The Gleaner, we watch TVJ and CVM and most Jamaicans get a sense of what that media entity is supporting and what is important to that respective media house.

“At TVJ we are very focused upon nation building and other media houses may have other criteria and agendas, and it is for the stakeholders to determine what those are and call people on them. Information should be ferreted out for discourse that is meaningful.”

A career in media

The media in Jamaica does not attract the brightest and the most talented. More often than not, many get disillusioned and move on to greener pastures. In many countries, particularly developed ones, a career in the media is seen as a commendable and rewarding avenue to pursue. Also you see people from differing social strata trying to carve out a meaningful career over a period of time. This is not so in Jamaica. The reality is the financial rewards are meagre, the hours long and at the end of the day, there is very little to show for it. The media houses have not been able to address this situation and in effect, media personnel get treated very similarly to indentured servants who give their labour for very little in return.

Simon Crosskill, Michael Sharpe and Dorraine Samuels have all gone the distance and are a credit to the profession who could do a good job anywhere in the world. There is also a propensity for “columnists and analysts” to enter the arena and in very little time supplant practising journalists who ply their trade every day. This is because the entry level and its fortifications can be easily breached.

Today you have the next generation of promising journalists and broadcasters with one foot out of the door. Emily Crooks, Kerriann Lee, Dione Jackson-Miller and one of the reporters at the Sunday Herald are all now studying law and beginning that process in their thirties. It seems that in Jamaica today, not many people want to build a career in media and hone their craft, rather they opt to use it as a stepping stone to lusher feeding grounds.

How does Osborne regard this startling reality?

“In order to develop a continuous stream of skilled professionals requires investment in training. News organisations need a pool of talent that they can draw on, so media aspirants need to exhibit aptitude and basic skill levels prior to joining media houses. Now basic skill levels include training journalists and imbuing them with presentational skills. Both are required for television. There has to be on-going training by media houses, but at the same time media practitioners need to pursue on-going development by themselves. It is not a one way-street. By this I mean they must act under their own volition to improve their skills.

“The recruitment pool, the training that has to occur and the self-improvement endeavours have not seen sufficient investments in Jamaica in any of those three areas. All three are important and need to happen on a sustained basis in order to get and keep good quality journalists.”

Looking outside of Jamaica

Osborne is of the view that media houses should now be looking outside of Jamaica for an additional revenue stream. With the Jamaican economy exhibiting little growth and with many more players chasing ever-decreasing advertising dollars, they must now look to export content.

“We now have to develop the industry in such a way that export becomes a viable option. Jamaica is a very small economy in which to invest and the economy is not growing. That is why it is important to re-orient the thinking of policymakers to see the growth of the industry coming outside of Jamaica.

“At TVJ one of our proudest accomplishments is developing an extraordinary online presence which we launched last year. We now have 700,000 visitors per month and are now one of the fastest-growing sites in the Caribbean. That tells you that there is interest in us outside of Jamaica,” she said on the subject of selling wares abroad.