Winston Derrick (1951 – February 2, 2013) was an

Antigua Antigua ( ), also known as Waladli or Wadadli by the native population, is an island in the Lesser Antilles. It is one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region and the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua and Ba ...

n journalist,

media personality Celebrity is a condition of fame and broad public recognition of a person or group as a result of the attention given to them by mass media. An individual may attain a celebrity status from having great wealth, their participation in sports ...

, and chairman and managing director of Antigua's Observer Group of Companies which he founded in 1993 with his brother Fergie Derrick. Derrick was the host of the popular "The Voice of the People" daily call-in news show on the media group's radio station Observer Radio 911 FM.

Career

In 1993, Derrick founded the Observer Media Group with his brother, Fergie Derrick, starting with a

daily newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sport ...

. In 1996, the empire expanded to Observer Radio which, at the time, was the first independent radio station in

Antigua and Barbuda Antigua and Barbuda (, ) is a sovereign country in the West Indies. It lies at the juncture of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in the Leeward Islands part of the Lesser Antilles, at 17°N latitude. The country consists of two ...

. Before its emergence, the government-owned Antigua Broadcasting Station (ABS) and Bird family owned ZDK (pronounced ''zed-ee-kay)'' were the only radio stations on the island. According to reporting from the Committee to Project Journalists, the

radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radi ...

faced repeated threats and sabotage from the Antiguan government led by

Lester Bird Sir Lester Bryant Bird KNH (21 February 1938 – 9 August 2021) was an Antigua and Barbuda politician and athlete who served as the second prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda from 1994 to 2004. He was chairman of the Antigua Labour Party (AL ...

at the time:

''Winston and Samuel Derrick, editor and publisher, respectively, of The Daily Observer, intended to crack that monopoly in 1996 when they created the independent station Observer Radio. But the government shut it down the day after the station began broadcasting. After winning a November 2000 appeal from the Privy Council in the United Kingdom, which acts as the final appellate court for countries within the British Commonwealth, the Derrick brothers were finally able to open their station on April 15, 2001. Observer Radio, which airs many call-in shows, quickly became immensely popular; estimates say that 75 to 80 percent of the country's radio listeners tune in to the station.'' ''The Derrick brothers reported significant government harassment. Samuel Derrick told CPJ that government officials often stop by the radio station to tell the brothers that their station will be closed. Recently, the government began broadcasting one of its shows on a frequency close to the one used by Observer Radio; since the government station has a more powerful transmitter, Observer Radio's signal is often disrupted. “They try to drown us out,” Derrick remarked. “Other than publicize it, there's not much we can do.”''

Derrick was interviewed by international publications regarding Antiguan and Barbudan affairs over the course of his career – particularly regarding the

Allen Stanford Robert Allen Stanford (born March 24, 1950) is an American financial fraudster, former financier, and sponsor of professional sports. He is serving a 110-year federal prison sentence, having been convicted in 2012 of fraud, on charges that his i ...

saga.

Death

Derrick died suddenly after drinking with friends at local restaurant Russell's in Fort James,

at the age of 62.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Derrick, Winston 1951 births 2013 deaths