Bermuda: Broadcaster to reduce work force - St. Lucia News Online

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HAMILTON, Bermuda, Feb 1, CMC — The long-established Bermuda Broadcasting Company says it plans to reduce its work force as the island’s media continue to struggle for survival in a tough environment.

The company, which has two TV stations that are affiliated with the ABC and CBS networks in the United States, and three radio stations, did not name any staff to be made redundant in its statement on Thursday night.

Businessman Kenny DeFontes, who provided Bermuda Broadcasting with its main competition, closed his television station, VSB, in 2014. His radio stations also later went off the air.

The Royal Gazette, which publishes six days a week, is the island’s only remaining newspaper. Its sister weekly, the Mid-Ocean News, stopped publication in 2009, followed five years later by the closure of the bi-weekly Bermuda Sun — victims of a dearth of advertising dollars in a congested market.

A Bermuda Broadcasting spokesman, bemoaning the fact that “advertising revenue has been sucked out of the local media to the benefit of social media”, said the broadcaster had been in “a state of transition for several years and harsh economic realities had forced the company to make some very difficult decisions.

“We are compelled to make the jobs of three people redundant today in order to decrease costs and retain our financial viability,” the spokesman said.

“It is with great reluctance that we make these redundancies today. (We) first started broadcasting as ZBM1 more than 70 years ago and is an integral part of the fabric of this community. And it’s as true today as it was when we first went on air — that an independent news media is vital to the overall health of our island democracy.

“We operate in a challenging and highly-competitive environment in which the pirating of television content is rife and certain corporations aggressively seek to expand their footprint by reselling (our) licensed programmes at a fraction of their true market value and often without our consent. Such practices undermine our ability to innovate, remain competitive and retain staff,” the spokesman added.