Gary Allen excited about journalism prospects arising from RJR-Gleaner merger

Gary Allen is Managing Director of the RJR Communications Group, but it is the influence of his earlier experience as a journalist that gets him most excited about the prospects of the pending merger of his company with The Gleaner newspaper.

RJR’s merger with the media component of The Gleaner Company, announced last year, is going through the required legal and regulatory processes, with the shareholders in both companies giving their assent last month.

Mr. Allen, speaking recently with RJR News about the possible synergies that should emerge from the partnership, was particularly keen on the two newsrooms, while remaining separate entities, benefiting from the historical materials available to each, and the combined expertise that can be applied to tell important stories.

“The access to the archives of The Gleaner is going to be hugely beneficial in developing a new product that Jamaica has not yet seen,” he said.

“I think that once this coming together takes place, our Emancipation Day programming will be different, because we’ll be able to relive, through the Gleaner archives what was happening in Jamaica between 1834 and 1838. When you think about 1938, 1865; what happened in the lead-up to Morant Bay, what were we reporting; what did we say people in the streets were saying and doing,” he added.

He envisages these stories of the post Emancipation era having significant global impact, extending to Jamaica’s ancestral contacts with West Africa and beyond.

“So, I see that as an excitement! I see a journalistic product, which is a Gleaner-RJR, or Gleaner-TVJ special reporting, and special documentary presentations. I see that as the excitement that will come, not whether or not we are going to be sitting down and deciding that on the front page of The Gleaner and The Star, and on TVJ’s news and on RJR this is the one position that we are going to carry. That is not excitement; that is not fun,” he said.

Editorial distinctions

Mr. Allen, responding to expressions of concerns regarding maintaining editorial distinctions between the two newsrooms after the merger, declared that there will be no attempt to interfere with those areas of differentiation.

Regarding RJR’s “reporting of the facts of what happen on a day to day basis and investigation things and bringing that investigating to the fore and calling people to book to analyze and give commentary on it,” he stressed that this has served RJR well for its 65 years. “I don’t think that we should trifle with that,” he said.

The Gleaner, on the other hand, has had a position-taking, editorial driven approach, which “is good for Jamaica,” he declared. 

“I do not think that putting that Gleaner structure on RJR is good for RJR, and I don’t think that putting RJR’s reporting and analysis structure on The Gleaner and abandoning the position-taking would be good for The Gleaner. So I think that there will have to remain a strong differentiation in the editorial direction of the organizations in that way,” he said.

NOTE: You may access parts 1 and 2 of Earl Moxam's interview with Gary Allen here and here.