New face

Rebecca Bird, the latest staff member to join The BVI Beacon team, will head supplements. Born in England, she started her journalism career as a junior reporter on a newspaper in east Manchester more than 11 years ago. After qualifying as a senior reporter, and seeking sunnier climes and a new adventure, she accepted a job on the Turks and Caicos Weekly News. As well as reporting and editing for that newspaper, Rebecca read the news on local radio and ran her own radio show. Now you’re most likely to see her out and about in the Virgin Islands taking photographs and conducting interviews for the Beacon’s monthly supplements. Her passions lie in travel, music and water sports, and she’s excited to experience what the islands have to offer.

Crunching numbers

A Beaconite likes to count things, even if it brings him great disappointment. Counting, he finds, is a good way to track government accountability. Here are his favourite numbers of the week:

• It has been 35 days since Education and Culture Minister Myron Walwyn referenced documents relating to the construction of the Elmore Stoutt High School classroom buildings in the House of Assembly. House procedure dictates that those documents were supposed to be made public, but they still have not been released.

• It has been 112 days since Premier Dr. Orlando Smith held a press conference.

• It has been 227 days since the contracted deadline for BVI Airways to establish a direct flight from Beef Island to Miami. No such flights have taken place and none are scheduled, even though the company has received $7 million of taxpayer money to help get off the ground.

Read the paper, please

Last week in the House of Assembly, Mitch Turnbull (R-D2) criticised the media for not highlighting more positive news about youths’ achievements. Beaconites were unhappy with Mr. Turnbull’s comments. Rather than paint the media with one brush, they feel, the representative should have been more specific with his condemnation. They invite Mr. Turnbull to peruse this week’s Beacon: The front page features the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College graduation; the cover of the Island Weekend and Culture section features the BVI Dance Fest; the front page of the business section features a job fair for young adults; and an article on page 8 features successful high school graduates. Nor is this lineup at all unusual: Each week’s Beacon tends to include multiple positive stories about the territory’s youths — not to mention the newspaper’s From the Schools page, which features outstanding student work every other week. Perhaps Mr. Turnbull was talking about a different media outlet. On the other hand, a quick review of other outlets shows that they too frequently provide positive coverage of youths. Perhaps, then, Mr. Turnbull didn’t read all of the news before he criticised it. If that’s the case, Beaconites hope he will be more thorough in the future and temper his criticisms accordingly.

BVI Airways ban

A Beaconite is dismayed that BVI Airways appears to be excluding the Beacon from all announcements sent by the government-subsidised airline’s publicist. Last week, the publicist — who had previously barred this reporter from a BVI Airways “open house” in April, despite sending the Beacon an invitation to the event the day before — told the Beaconite that this newspaper had been removed from BVI Airways’ mailing list. She has not provided an explanation for barring him from the open house or for removing him from the mailing list, but the Beaconite suspects the moves could be related to an article he wrote in March, which reported questions about the airline’s past and described seemingly contradictory statements provided by the publicist and the company’s CEO. If this is the case, the Beaconite is highly troubled by the publicist’s action. If BVI Airways officials have issues with his coverage, he would be happy to speak with them — they’ve declined or ignored multiple interview requests in recent months — or suggest that they write a letter to the editor. But given that BVI Airways is a government-subsidised company, blackballing a media outlet from receiving information about the airline is not so different from a government attempt to censor the media, in his opinion. He hopes the publicist will put the Beacon back on the mailing list, and that she will permit Beacon reporters to attend future BVI Airways events.

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