Jones P. Madeira

Jones P. Madeira is a journalist from Trinidad and Tobago.^[1][2]

Early career

Madeira began his career as an amateur broadcaster with the Voice of Rediffusion, a wired radio channel of the Trinidad Broadcasting Company which also operated the Radio Trinidad station. His first professional position in journalism was in the print media as a reporter with the Trinidad Publishing Company, publishers of the Guardian newspapers. He did general reporting including the Magistrates's and High Courts of the country, firstly from the city desk, and then promoted to man the operations of the bureau of the media house at Piarco International Airport for several years.

Madeira eventually branched off to full-time broadcasting as a News Editor/Reporter with the state-owned National Broadcasting Service, which operated NBS Radio 610. He is well remembered for his coverage of the 1970 Black Power Revolution. He received a fellowship and was also seconded to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London for advanced broadcast training, and became a producer with the Overseas Regional Services of the BBC, broadcasting out of Bush House, London. He returned home later and rejoined NBS 610 as Senior Producer, News and Current Affairs.

Madeira then left broadcasting to become an Adviser in Media Relations and Public Information at the Secretariat of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), serving the Caribbean region out of Georgetown, Guyana, under contract from the London-based Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation (CFTC). He was part of a team under UNESCO Consultant and Broadcast Executive Hugh Cholomondeley of Guyana, and including fellow Trinidadian broadcaster Dik Henderson, Guyanese broadcaster Ron Saunders, and Guyanese diplomat Evan Drayton, responsible for promoting the Caribbean integration movement. Their work included the further development of the Caribbean News Agency (CANA) and the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU), and the expansion of the co-operation of electronic media houses in the Caribbean in the areas of programme production and exchanges, engineering and broadcast training. After five years in this position, Madeira assumed the position as the first full-time Secretary General of the CBU. After establishing and running the CBU office for a year out of Bridgetown, Barbados, he returned to Trinidad and Tobago to assume the position of Public Relations Manager of the National Insurance Property Development Company Limited (NIPDEC),a major state enterprise involved in construction and property management, including such projects as the Trinidad and Tobago Financial Complex,the Trinidad and Tobago Hall of Justice, the Trinidad and Tobago Forensic Sciences Centre, the Hugh Wooding Law School, and several of the country's mass public housing estates.

Madeira re-entered mass media as Head of News and Current Affairs of Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT), a position he held even during an attempted coup by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation, the Jamaat al Muslimeen, in July 1990. Madeira became a key hostage during that crisis, having firstly to announce the insurgency to the national population with gunmen and the leader of the militants at his side on the set, and subsequently, along with his main Anchor, Dominic Kalipersad, having to undertake a number of appearances to keep the country abreast.He received an award from one of the leading newspapers of the country, the Trinidad Express, citing him as one of his country's individuals of the year for his leadership role during that event.

During his tenure at the TTT, he pioneered several major regional broadcast projects as a member of the Board of the CBU, including the CARIBVISION Project which undertook live productions on major events in many Caribbean capitals,and the CARIBSCOPE Television Magazine, which became the prototype of a transcription television program exchange in the Caribbean. The current expanded efforts at regional broadcasting in the Caribbean grew out of those early efforts by Madeira and a German counterpart, Michael Abend, who was made available to the CBU by the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung to develop news exchanges among radio and television systems in the region. For his contribution to the development of regional broadcasting, Madeira was inducted into the prestigious Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame, which now includes noted Trinidadian media personalities as Ken Gordon, who served for several years as Chairman of the Caribbean Communications Network (CCN) and a pioneer of the Caribbean News Agency and a champion of Caribbean Press Freedom, and Trevor McDonald, who was for several years the leading television news anchor in the United Kingdom.

Following TTT, Madeira again diversified his career by becoming Manager, News and Current Affairs and Caribbean Relations of the Trinidad Broadcasting Company, the same company where he began as an amateur broadcaster,and Editor in Chief of the Trinidad Publishing Company Limited, the first media house that hired him as a journalist. He resigned his position as Editor in Chief of the Guardian newspapers along with the majority of his Senior Editorial Team during a confrontation with the government and publishers over freedom of the press, and became one of the pioneers of a new but now defunct newspaper, the Independent.

Madeira then moved into public health communication, serving as Information Adviser at the Caribbean Epidemiology Centre (CAREC), an arm of the Pan American Health Organisation/World Health Organisation (PAHO/WHO), in a unit designing and implementing information, education and communication projects in support of the Caribbean response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. After almost a decade in that position, Madeira moved to the position as Manager/Adviser of the Communication Unit of the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Health. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Caribbean New Media Group, a new state entity which replaced Trinidad and Tobago Television (the National Broadcasting Service) which was wound up by the government three years ago to make way for an expanded and more modern electronic and new media network.

Madeira has received several awards for his work in broadcasting and journalism, including the very prestigious Luminary of Journalism award by British Petroleum of Trinidad and Tobago (BPTT) in 2007. He lives in the east Trinidad town of Arima where he was born on June 9, 1944, and whose leaders have gone as far as naming one of its streets after him. He is married to Melba, née Lathuillerie, and has three children: Melanie, Lorilee and Justin, as well as three grandchildren: Justine, Christy-Anne, and Elyse.

Madeira recently assumed the position as Manager of the Information and Protocol Division of the Judiciary of Trinidad and Tobago.

In 2014 assumed the post of Editor-in-Chief at Newsday a daily newspaper printed by Daily News Ltd.

References