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CBU Caribbean Media Hall Of Fame
Jones P. Madeira

Jones P. Madeira

Jones P. Madeira was born in the east Trinidad town of Arima in 1944. He 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 entered broadcasting full-time as a News Editor/Reporter with the state-owned National Broadcasting Service. From there he received a fellowship and became a producer with the Overseas Regional Services of the BBC, broadcasting out of Bush House, London. Madeira returned home and re-joined NBS 610 as Senior Producer, News and Current Affairs, and along with a team of young broadcasters, introduced and produced a range of news and current affairs initiatives.

In 1976, he moved on to the position of Adviser in Media Relations and Public Information at the Secretariat of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and part of a UNESCO team, headed by CBU founder, Hugh Cholmondeley, 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 cooperation 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 from 1981 to 1982.

After a short stint in the state sector, he re-entered mass media as Head of News and Current Affairs of Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT). In July 1990 he became a key hostage during an attempted coup in Trinidad and Tobago 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, having to undertake a number of appearances to keep the country abreast. 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 daily satellite exchanges among regional television systems, live productions of major events in many Caribbean capitals, and the CARIBSCOPE Television Magazine, which became the prototype of a transcription television program exchange in the Caribbean.

Following TTT, he again diversified his career by becoming Manager, News and Current Affairs and Caribbean Relations of the Trinidad Broadcasting Company, and Editor in Chief of the Trinidad Publishing Company Limited. 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.

He then moved into public health communication, serving as Information Adviser at the Caribbean Epidemiology Centre (CAREC). After almost a decade in that position, he moved to the position as Manager/Adviser of the Communication Unit of the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Health, and subsequently became Court Protocol and Information Manager of the Judiciary of Trinidad and Tobago.

In 2014 he assumed the post of Editor-in-Chief at the daily newspaper Newsday.

Jones P. Madeira was inducted into the CBU Caribbean Media Hall Of Fame in 2000.

Country

Trinidad and Tobago

Inducted

2000

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