The first ever Media Survey and Analysis commissioned by the Advertising Agencies
Association of Trinidad and Tobago clearly places the Express, Daily and Sunday, as the No. 1
newspaper in the nation.
     Other surveys and analyses over the last decade indicated a similar trend but none so
outright as that by Media Facts and Opinion conducted earlier this year on the Association's
request.
     And so, the Express is just 21 years old and already the No. 1 newspaper in the nation.
     They are not the first to do it... the now defunct Daily and Sunday Mirror did it in the early
60s in less years. But this was never confirmed with a survey as it is today.
     In ways more than one, the Mirror had set the pace with its IMPACT paper: TABLOID.
     Full colour capability and off-set printing in the production of a daily newspaper had come
to Trinidad and Tobago... and readers and advertisers alike, then and today, loved it.
     And before the Mirror, with its base in London,  threw some 256 of us on the breadline in
its conclusion of a "deal" with the Guardian's  foreign owner, Lord Thomson, the nation's
readership had already acquired an appetite for tabloids.
     But the nation was back into the clutches of "monopoly" without the "tabloid impact, crisp
sharp headlines, to-the-point stories and the necessary second-voice of a democratic society."
     Foreign-owned, the Mirror had no "loyalty or ties" to the people of Trinidad and Tobago,
but in its "objective" quest, gave to the nation a technology and art in newspapering, second to
none.
     Another thing, given the taste of a new style and type of journalism, readership just grew
and though the Mirror is no more, the appetite thus created was there to be satisfied.
     That is what those of us who marched through the streets of Port-of-Spain in 1966 with
placards and banners, hand clapping and chanting "we shall overcome" with well-wishers at our
side in sun and rain, knew and understood.
     It was Friday, September 2, 1966, while holidaying with my family at Mayaro, a Police
Officer came asking for me. It was near midday and I had but just a few hours to attend a 3 p.m.
meeting at the Mirror's Park Street Office in Port-of-Spain.
     "It gotta be something big," I thought as I drove to the meeting via Manzanilla and the
Eastern Main Road. The fact is I thought it would be announcement of a Southern Mirror or
perhaps a special publication for teenagers. It had to be, for only the weekend earlier, during a
game of scrabble at Mayaro, Mirror's Managing Director Keith Davenport had promised to give
my thinking some thought.
     My vacation had another two weeks to go before I returned to the South Office  as
manager. Naturally, it seemed... Davenport is a fast worker.
     Shacked. This would be a mild term. Just six weeks later, I was hospitalised for the next 31
days. I had a "heart attack."
     At the meeting we were told to vacate the premises in less than 20 minutes... Lord
Thomson, Canadian owner of the Trinidad Guardian was the new owner of the Trinidad Mirror.
And by the time I got back to San Fernando, the South Office on Coffee Street was "double
padlocked" with guards posted at both entrances.
     "No man, dat ain't true... must be a joke," my thought reacted at the announcement,
remembering Cecil King of the Mirror Group of Newspapers hinting us some months earlier at the
Trinidad Hilton that Lord Thomson had offered the Guardian to him.
     But it was no joke. Davenport, having kept the announcement a secret, was dead serious.
And to me "well, I had passed this way before."
     Some years earlier, the Trinidad Chronicle, formerly the "Old Lady of St. Vincent Street,"
the Port of Spain Gazette, where I got my first staff appointment in 1956 and served as Branch
Manager, South, had gone under.
     But that was different... it was no surprise after our plan to launch the first nine-column
newspaper collapsed before the Sunday morning print run was complete, the new press broke-
down.
     Several months had gone with concerned staffers accepting half or less pay. It was a
question o survival but that was not enough. At a "very important" meeting at St. Vincent Street,
Port of Spain, we were told that the Company had gone into "receivership" and its doors were
closed.
     The Chronicle folded, practically on the even of a general election and the Mirror did the
same. And in neither case was there even a "drop of crocodile tears" from the powers that
professed and preached "freedom of the press" and "democracy."
     And the people knew then as they do today, a single voice will never do for the survival of
a truly democratic process... it was that threat to the democratic process that gave birth to the
Express... the newspaper that in less than 21 years has the largest readership in Trinidad and
Tobago.
     But much more than "philosophy" was needed, for the perpetrators of the "get-rich-quick"
syndrome who thrived on "monopoly" had already gone to work.
     There was "no room for two newspapers" became the theme backed-up with the analysis
that "the Mirror did not make it... how could the locals do it." There was not enough advertising to
go around, the argument would go on.
     What was also seen by the "monopolistic thinkers" was the massive jump in circulation of
about 20,000 to 30,000 almost overnight, since the Mirror had "generated" additional readers,
whose appetite had to be satisfied.
     And this "jump" as "newspapering" would analyse meant certain jump in advertising rates.
     But the Mirror men and women who marched the city streets with banner-waving Gene
Miles leading the way, had come to believe in themselves and the people of Trinidad and Tobago.
     By their persistence and "action" a spirit was born... a spirit that has permeated our
democratic society in which for the past 21 years w boast not only of two dailies but note the
mushrooming of a number publications including weeklies.
     But that "spirit" would have been still born had it not been for the young businessman with
the "golden touch", Vernon Charles, who must have been moved by the voices of the jobless
Mirror staffers and the vacuum left by the Mirror's demise.
     That astute thinker, Charles heard, understood, more than many, not only the hue and cry
of the hundreds of jobless but, perhaps, the dangers of "monopoly" and its attending fate to
advertisers and readers alike. Concerned, Charles preached that the country needed another
voice... an independent voice.
     And as if by a magic wand, those immortal words echoed throughout the land, drawing a
number of businessmen, professionals and laymen, to give birth to what is declared today, by the
Advertising Agencies Association, as the No. 1 Newspaper of Trinidad and Tobago.
     The people's choice.