INTERVIEW

“Everything is changing”: Outgoing RJRGLEANER CEO, Gary Allen, on the media organisation’s digital future

1st December 2023

In a final interview with PMA before he steps down from his role as CEO, Gary Allen talks to PMA about the challenges currently facing RJRGLEANER.

Long-standing PMA board member, Gary Allen, has announced that he will stand down as CEO of Jamaica’s largest media company, RJRGLEANER Communications Group, at the end of December.  

RJRGLEANER emerged from the 2015 merger of the RJR and Gleaner media groups to become the Caribbean country’s largest print, television, radio and digital media company.  

Mr Allen was first made chief executive of RJR in 2003 and carried on as the head of the newly merged entity in 2016. But in October, it was announced that Mr Allen would step down at the end of the year, though he will remain with the company in an executive position, and will also continue in his capacity as a board member. 

The group is headed by a parent company, Radio Jamaica, which operated under the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation until it was dissolved in 1996 and RJR become publicly traded. The Jamaican government has since returned to media ownership with the Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica. 

Allen’s resignation comes at a time when the company, and country, is going through a series of broadcast changes, including a planned switching off of analogue television, new regulations for private and public broadcasters, and efforts to compete in the digital age.  

Before the announcement, Gary Allen sat down with PMA’s Harry Lock in London ahead of the Weekly Gleaner Honours Awards to discuss the changes sweeping through Jamaican broadcasting. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Harry Lock: To begin with a really broad question, what are the top issues at the top of RJRGLEANER’s agenda at the moment?  

Gary Allan: I think our change process is well and truly in force at the moment, because we are in a space within the media where I think, globally, we recognise that everything is changing. We have had the merger of a newspaper with a group of radio and television stations, and we know globally that newspapers have been under significant pressure. We know that broadcast has been doing a little bit better, but there is the process of the digital switchover that is taking place.  

In Europe there is the switch to DAB for radio, which is not happening in the Caribbean – there is not a switch taking place for radio at all in the Caribbean. But there is a switch that is taking place for television. So television is moving from its analogue state into a digital state because of our geographic location. The independent nations of the Caribbean are all moving towards the North American Standard, whereas those territories that are European colonies, such as the French territories of Martinique, Guadeloupe; the British territories, the Dutch territories, they are moving to whatever has happened in Europe, whereas the ones that are independent, that is Jamaica, Trinidad and so on, we’re moving towards those that are American-based because of proximity of the market and so on. So that is taking place at the moment and where we fall is, how do we maintain our public media perspectives? How do we continue our public service activities, funded by commercial activities that we have to do because we are not government-funded in any way.  

So for the next two years, we have to carry through this transition, pay for the transition from our activities, maintain that public service mandate in what it is that we do, but remain relevant and feasible financially. And that’s a big ask. 

Read more: The Existential Threat posed by Big Tech Platforms to Caribbean Journalism and Democracy (Insight) 

HL: And the digital switchover is an expensive transition? 

GA: It is an expensive transition. We make, on average, half a million US dollars in profit each year. This is going to cost us in transition for television about $7 million. So, you can see in terms of what you make each year and what you have to spend for this one-time switchover that the payback is going to be over 10 years. 

HL:  The digital switchover is just happening for TV and not for radio, do you mind explaining a bit about why that decision was made to not include radio within this?  

GA: The radio market in Jamaica is at the moment about 28 to 30 national radio stations in a market of less than three million people. That’s a lot of radio stations for a small number of people and that market is one where you have cars that if you switch to a digital radio, how do you change all of the radio sets in your cars? You will have to change out radio sets in your homes and so on. So, it is unlikely that you would have a successful switchover.  

Especially where radio has now moved to having their content available on other platforms like apps and streaming content and so on. So, the decision was taken that, one, [the] change would be too great, [and] two, there would be too significant an economic burden on small radio operators that they could not sustain. And because of Jamaica’s terrain, we are so tiny, but it takes 15, 18 different radio transmitters to actually cover our geographic location so you [would] need to replace a lot of that equipment. So, it was just not a good economic model to get there.  

I think the regulators saw that, the policymakers saw that, and therefore they didn’t go that route, even though the radio spectrum is exhausted in terms of of the amount of radio licences that they have been able to grant, and they have people who want a licence but can’t get any frequencies. So, it’s just not good business sense at the moment. 

HL: Meanwhile, in the TV business, while the tech changes, the content stays the same? 

GA: The drive is to make sure that the content stays the same, except that the content has to be available on multiple platforms. It has to reach audiences wherever they are. So, a part of the change is also to broaden the number of platforms on which your content is available. We look at how we can use digital processes to change our workflows to make things more efficient, to see how it is that one person can actually deliver far more output than they were delivering when it was all analogue processing, to see how it is that we can take advantage of over-the-top services, IP services, things in social media. How it is that we do all of that and monetise each of them to make sure that we’re coming back at least to what we were earning before the digital fragmentation started to take place. 

HL: Is the government putting any assistance or any funding subsidies into this transition at all? 

GA: No, the government is not assisting the broadcasters in this process at all, the government has considered but have not confirmed whether or not they will help some consumers with reception equipment. So you may need set top boxes or you may have to change your television sets entirely, depending on which one of those you do and depending on a means test that is done. But it is not confirmed at this point. 

HL: Is there any other way that this will impact audiences, or just media consumers in general? 

GA: I believe there’s a lot that is unknown, untested in markets that are our size, as well as having the economic challenges that we have, and so on. I think there are a number of things to look at. 

One, there is a mandate for all the broadcasters to carry the public broadcasting service as a part of their network. Two, our mandate was for the format to be high-definition, it does not accommodate standard-definition. We are in discussions [because] we think that there is some support for that change at the regulatory level, we want it at the policy level because that will allow for some additional flexibility.  

There has been a discussion about whether or not there should be a multiplex operator that’s an established operator who can serve the various broadcasters. There is not a consensus on that position at the moment. And in fact, the policy position that has been announced has said that the broadcasters cannot establish multiplex operators, but there can be an independent multiplex operator who can provide services to others. That’s still a grey and probably dark grey area because we really don’t understand what that means.  

The issue of set top boxes – and whether set top boxes will be made to accommodate all of the services that are possible, or just some basic setup or a kind of high-end set top box, which gives different features – all of those are things that are yet to be finalised. Are they going to have advanced alerts for warning systems? We are in an area where we do have hurricanes, we do have flooding, we do have earthquakes. Are there likely to be those kinds of features that will be made available in what is presented. So, all of those are still questions that are to be answered. And if those are features that will require additional funding to make them happen.  

So, there’s still a fair amount that has to be dealt with. But you know, there is an additional driving factor for the broadcasters which is that analogue equipment is getting scarce. So, we no longer have the ability to say, well, let’s continue in analogue until they work this all out, we have to move. Because if we don’t move, we could end up at a point where there’s a transmitter that is obsolete, and we can’t replace it because there is no decision as to all of these digital things.  

HL: Just on the final point about how this might fit in with the wider need for broadcasters to be present and able to provide those lifesaving updates when you do have natural disasters, how else do you see this transition impacting or assisting with your own remit and your own ability to provide those critical pieces of information and updates?  

GA: Well, one of the things to understand, firstly, is that within the market there are multiple options and sources for the reception of television services. So, there is the over-the-air service, which broadcasters provide their cable services, their internet-provided services. So, the consumers do have a choice.  

What the profile of the Caribbean shows is that most of the people who are in the lower socio-economic grouping are the people who depend on over-the-air television services. Primarily, they can’t afford to pay monthly rates for cable or for IPTV services or broadband services that wouldn’t allow them to do that. So, you are actually trying to serve the most vulnerable. One of the big advantages of the digital switchover is that this allows the broadcaster to provide you with multiple channels of service.  

So, the lowest socio-economic grouping will have access to more content, at no charge to them. That additional content can drive into different areas, some of it can be greater cultural content that we expose them, a lot of it could be more entertainment, more youth related, some educational content, some sporting content. That is, more domestic sporting content, rather than high-cost, high-end international content. So, it gives us far greater ability to generate interest and help the lower socio-economic community at the same time, if the content is well produced, high quality, [and] attractive enough.  

So, you could actually make your economic model more robust with some paid content that you can make available to the community, and you can use funding from that to develop other public service type content that you make available to the wider audience. So, the ecosystem is changing in such a way that once you surpass those challenges, it adds opportunities for you to actually build into a more robust economic model going forward.  

 HL: If we can, I’d like to move on to the Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica, and the government is currently considering what it wants the PBC to focus on. Can you explain a bit about that process, what’s happening there, your role in that, and where you think RJRGLEANER fits in? 

 GA: So where we are, is that we have the Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica that was established using funding from a divestment exercise that was carried out, is funded on a particular act. It is supposed to receive its funding support from sources that are either going to be gathered through regulatory-earned funds or some special funding from government.