Deidre Forbes adds voice to Black community in Britain

Thirty-six-year-old Jamaican, Deidre Forbes, is the group editor of one of Britain’s leading black national papers — Voice — and she is proud of it.

“It is great. This is like my dream job — I am doing what I want to do and just about everyone in the black community knows about the Voice. It is highly respected,” she said.

She boasted that after 20 years, Voice was one of the very few solely black owned institutions in London.

“Black owned institutions are rare in London and Voice is one of them. Voice has stood the test of time and this is a significant achievement,” Forbes told All Woman. The readership base, she explained is mostly Caribbean and African migrants and their descendants. It has a circulation of about 50,000 persons.

Forbes has been Group Editor for a month. After eight and a half years of service there, she has gradually worked her way through the ranks.

“It was my first job which I got straight out of university in 1989. I graduated in July and started here in August as an entertainment reporter,” she said. I went on to become the entertainment editor and then head of the Entertainment Department.”

It has been a long road for the little country girl who left Manchioneal in Portland to go to Sheffield in Britain to start high school.

“I was born at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), and lived in Kingston for six years before being carted off to Manchioneal to stay with an aunt and uncle after my mother went to Britain,” she recalled. “I lived with them for seven years, sitting common entrance and attending high school for a year before my mother sent for me.”

For her, the British lifestyle was a major cultural change but she gradually adjusted.

Having completed O and A’ level exams, she went on to the University of Sussex in Brighton, where she did a three -year degree in English Literature.

“When I finished and I realised that I wanted to be in media, somebody said to me why don’t you try Voice — see if they will give you some work experience. I went there and spoke to them and they said I could do two weeks to get some experience. When the time was up they offered me a job,” she explained.

Last week, Forbes was in Jamaica for 11 days seeing family and paying a visit to her mother’s grave.

“My mom died in 2000 and I have been back every year since then. She was buried in Dovecot,” she told All Woman last Monday, shortly before she was scheduled to leave the island.

While here though, she received the devastating news that founder, owner and publisher of Voice, Vic McCalla had died suddenly on Thursday, August 22.

“It is just so much of a shock. It probably won’t hit fully until I am back there. It is a major loss as he contributed so much to the Black community in London,” she said.

McCalla, also a Jamaican by birth, was the person she reported directly to. According to her, it was too early to say what impact his death would have at the paper.

Last Monday was particularly significant too, she said, because it was the 20th birthday of Voice.

Forbes could not help reminiscing about some of her times with the newspaper. She spoke of a struggling paper called Pride, a woman’s weekly lifestyle magazine which McCalla had bought and asked her to launch and run. “Pride was a new experience for me as I had to edit a magazine like that to appeal to the taste of Black British women,” she said.

“It was however quite welcome,” she said, ” because previous to its entry on the market, women used to buy Black American magazines like Essence and Ebony.” She was the editor here for three years and then she was asked to launch another magazine. This time it was for young white teenagers.

“I had to start from scratch but the magazine looked at pop stuff, personalities and so on,” she said. After seven years at Voice she left to work with another publisher in 1996.

Her new job specifically asked her to launch another magazine dealing with black hair.

“We looked at the flexibility of black hair, the work of salons across the country. There were features and sections on grooming. I worked here for two years and then took some time out for myself because I lost my mother and wanted time to grieve,” she said.

So March 2001 found her back at Voice. “The Publisher asked me to start the magazine Woman to Woman, which is a free 24-page glossy publication that comes out monthly. After that I was also asked to do Young Voices — a magazine which appeals to the black teenage market,” she explained. Last month, she was promoted to group editor of Voice Publications, which has her overseeing the publishing of all three magazines — Woman to Woman, Young Voices and Voice. “We also have a very strong Jamaican based readership,” she said. White readership was roughly about 15 per cent, she added.

While she says she misses the writing that she used to do in the early days there, she also finds her editorial post to be very enjoyable.

“This is a much more managerial position and I enjoy it more but it does not leave me that much time to write,” she said. She reminisced about some of the superstars that she had interviewed including Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, Halle Berry, Wesley Snipes and Maya Angelou.

But said she, when she started out in entertainment reporting, public relations persons did not dictate the direction of the interview as much as they do now.

“Interviews today are dictated by the public relations persons. They will tell you that ‘you have 20 minutes with Will Smith and he will only speak about Men in Black.’ Sometimes you have to wonder what the point of the interview is if it is so strictly defined,” she said.

Despite these constraints though, she boasted that they were able to stay ahead of the competition by keeping the paper relevant and fresh. For many years, Voice used to be the only black publication but now she said there was one other main competitor.

“We are not complacent about them but they still have a lot of work to do to catch up with us,” Forbes quipped. She explained that her paper was a campaigning paper and also dealt with issues concerning black British persons. She gave the example of the death of a black British youngster, Steven Lawrence, who was murdered at a bus stop under racist circumstances.

“We were at the forefront of those, highlighting the issue and advocating that something needed to be done,” she said.

Work aside, what does she do in her free time? According to her she has no free time.

“My job is very much intertwined with my social life so sometimes I find that events and things land on my desk and I don’t have the time to go,” she said.

What’s her favourite meal? Fried dumplings, ackee and saltfish, of course.

Jamaica is her home, she said and she has made sure to keep her links here quite strong by coming back at least once every year.