We enjoy serving you and we are proud of the fact that we are still doing so after 25 years.

As indicated in our motto “One paper, many people”, we consider it our duty to serve all communities. We also accept our responsibility to be the voice of reason in the society.

We adopted that dual role from day one. After The Caribbean Camera was established on June 6, 1990, the solid foundation work put out by our team, under the leadership of our former managing editor Raynier Maharaj set the tone for our commitment to service and reasoned advocacy.

Ray brought to the task the dedication to journalism and to professionalism which he had developed in Trinidad and Tobago and gave many years of yeoman’s service to our newspaper before moving on.

Such dedication continues to be our hallmark and we cannot survive without the tireless efforts of team-players such as our ubiquitous Gerald V. Paul whose reports and photographs contribute significantly to the high quality of our weekly issues.

Such dedication was also evident in the well-researched columns of our deceased associate editor Colin Rickards. Colin’s sudden passing in 2011 left a void in our team. He specialized in political, social and cultural history, culture and the arts. The wide range of areas of which he was so fond attested to the extent of his curiosity, his attention to detail and his amazing memory-bank.

Like that veteran, we have remained committed to promoting music, writing, food and all other aspects of culture and the arts. Our Caribbean Sun Fest attracted crowds of 120,000 persons annually. The three main carnival arts – costume design, calypso / soca and steelpan music – receive the year-round coverage they fully deserve.

With equal vigor, we provide an array of editorials, commentaries and reports on the political and social subjects that are so relevant to the realities of your daily life. It is not by chance that you will sometimes see contradictory views on the same subject in the same issue of our newspaper. That reflects our respect for the principles of balanced reporting and freedom of opinion.

In that context, we feel obliged to advocate for the social, economic, political and ethical causes about which you also feel very strongly. Some of our major concerns are equity and justice, poverty reduction, public transit, education, health care delivery, the rights and needs of our indigenous peoples, racism and racial profiling and the rights and wellbeing of all disadvantaged social sectors, including youth, immigrants, women and the LGBTQ community. In the category of “blatant national disgrace”, we do not hesitate to list poverty, the treatment of indigenous peoples and police carding.

This is the strategic importance of community newspapers like ours. We provide leadership on the issues that matter to our communities and we encourage and facilitate community participation in the process of having these issues addressed, as we have been doing with the objectionable practice of carding.

We hold elected officials and public officers accountable for their actions and their inaction, where appropriate. We are less prone to being “influenced” by politicians and businesspersons than the mainstream media and we are generally not owned nor managed by them.

Because we are not as driven by the commercial viability factor as the major media houses, we focus more attention on positive developments  in our society such as student and youth successes .We grant greater access to expression  to these two  and many other segments of society. We keep smaller communities and the wider community together.

In short, for community newspapers such as your Caribbean Camera, you matter.

We are proud to have served you for the past 25 years and look forward to serving you for the next 25 years.