Desmond Allen who received the Order of Distinction for sterling contribution to journalism in the 2014 National Honours and Awards, won the Jamaica Broilers Award for his 2004-2005 Sunday Observer series ‘The Desmond Allen Interviews’. Here are excerpts of some of his most popular stories:

Gary Allen: In a great big hurry to achieve

Gary Allen, clearly, is in a great big hurry. Why else would he, at 39 years of age, have already held down corporate leadership positions that relatively few, including accomplished men twice his age, dare even dream of?

Chief operating officer of the regional Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC), programme operations manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) and now director of operations at Television Jamaica (TVJ), Allen’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. And no one has done him any favour.

The story of Gary Hugh Allen, if short on years, is long on substance. With him resides extraordinary tales of little known events behind the birth of CVM Television, locally, and the emergence of the CMC, regionally. He can speak of the painful moments when the Caribbean News Agency (Cana) took its last gasps. He can talk about what it feels like to be locked out of an Olympic Village thousands of miles away from home, with the men and women of his crew looking to him to save their rapidly dying dream of bringing the Olympic Games to the sports-hungry living rooms of the Caribbean.

When Lester Spaulding brought him home from Barbados, it was a return to unwarranted controversy and exaggerated claims that were dramatised in the resignation of a powerful TVJ general manager. And it was a return to a place that helped substantially to set the stage for his superlative growth and development in a profession that in time would hail him as the outstanding journalist of the year.

Gary Allen, out of Change Hill, Carron Hall in St Mary, is a local boy made good and a journalistic success story. But he would have to overcome a humble beginning and vision-impairing myopia, before embarking on his unwavering climb to the dizzying heights from which he can now tell a story of relentless courage.

Dr Leahcim Semaj: The one who came to turn things around

On August 17, 1951, three significant events took place in the life of Jamaica.

Event number one: Hurricane Charlie came huffing and puffing mightily and blew large numbers of houses down, killing 54 persons and leaving a trail of devastation hitherto not known to Jamaicans.

Event number two: Garveyites celebrated the anniversary of the birth of the man who would come to be hailed as Jamaica’s first national hero, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the island’s gift of hope to the struggling black world.

Event number three: Michael Anthony James is born and, in time, would rename himself Leahcim Semaj, by turning his name backwards and incorporating the Swahili word Tufani, meaning “the one who came with the storm to turn things around”.

In several significant ways, Semaj’s life would mirror the turbulence that raged on that August day as his mother, Agnes Blake, a factory worker, brought her only child into an uncertain world. The cataclysmic events might also have foretold that here was one who had come to shake things up.

On his JobBank business card, Leahcim Semaj describes himself as a change agent, where others would have called themselves CEO, executive chairman or managing director. Colourful, controversial, articulate, possessed he is too of that Kingston College bravado, Semaj is above all a creative genius with an uncanny knack for reinventing himself to remain ahead of his circumstances and that of the nation’s.

What is it that men will remember most about Leahcim Semaj? When the history of the Jamaican economy is written, we might well be celebrating his social activism that helped to bring about the establishment of foreign exchange cambios. But his magnetic personality and energy have lit up areas as diverse as education and media. He claims authorship of the name Television Jamaica (TVJ) but he will not soon forget the epilogue to his sojourn at the station when Marcia Forbes solemnly pronounced “You cannot serve two masters”, when he conducted a market survey for her arch-competitor, CVM-TV, while hosting the highly successful ‘Man Talk’. And then there are the ‘missing’ years spent in the United States where the steely character we know now was tempered.

These days, Semaj has been traveling the length and breadth of Jamaica, spreading the gospel of the new work order, harnessing the latest in information and communication technology to bring the island, if not kicking and screaming, at least by persuasion, into the modern world of the global workplace. It behooves us, once again, to begin at the beginning – at the ‘lying-in’ at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital in Kingston, as the fierce winds of Charlie howled outside.

Cliff Hughes – Is the Journalist of the Year all that?

Journalists are probably the worst critics of journalists. Not probably: they are. But last December, in recognising their peers, journalists in the Press Association of Jamaica titled Cliff Hughes the Journalist of the Year 2003. It’s an accolade that can only be won, because nobody who wields a pen or sits behind a microphone is going to do anyone such a huge favour. It says a lot about Hughes.

And indeed a lot is said about Cliff Hughes. His detractors think he is melodramatic, hungers after the sensational and is a tad emotional in his handling of certain issues. But they quietly admire him for his grit, his courage to take on the tough and his business acumen which defies the old journalistic midwives’ tale that money can’t be made out of news.

The Cliff Hughes story is not untypical of the way rags-to-riches episodes evolve, except that he is still waiting to be rich by conventional definition. His too has been a steep, often uncertain climb from stark poverty.

On the long journey from Papine to Nationwide Power- 106, his hand was held by many kind souls, among them easily recognised media names: like Alma Mock Yen, radio czar of yesteryear who “was dreadfully intimidating at first”; Dorraine Samuels whose gentle touch quieted his “violently trembling hands and breaking voice” as he read his first sports-news script; Janet Mowatt who gave him a job at the height of a desperate moment; the late Hugh Crosskill Jnr who, “not a day goes by that I don’t miss him”.

He carries with him an enduring admiration for the late Prime Minister Michael Manley, crediting him for a policy which allowed him to get an education out of the public purse. He recalls his friendship with Phillip Paulwell whom he introduced to the People’s National Party (PNP) east Kingston organisation. But above all, Cliff Hughes wants it known that he is the product of his single-parent mother, Delrose Freeman who was ditched shortly after his birth by his father, Clarence Hughes, now deceased.

Next: Dr Carolyn Gomes; Supt Ionie Ramsay-Nelson; Marcia Forbes