People know Wakenaam as a small island in the Essequibo River. What many people do not know is that the island produced some of Guyana’s best entrepreneurs. Many of them are leading businessmen in the city. It also produced Glenn Lall, the publisher and owner of Guyana’s most popular and most widely circulated daily newspaper in the country.
Glenn Lall did not start out as a newspaper person. He was a businessman who began selling green vegetables as a teenager in Stabroek Market. As his skills developed, so too did his drive to expand on what he did. He attempted to sell anything that there was to sell and continued to do so until he cast his eyes even further.
His first journey outside the country saw him going to the United States, taking his business skills with him. He worked for a while, accumulated some money, and bought things that Guyana needed. Those were the days when foreign exchange was almost non-existent and when people were denied things that they had grown accustomed to.
Glenn Lall continued and his entrepreneurial skills propelled him further into the world of business but even then he did not think about owning a newspaper. One day with some expendable income, he accepted an invitation to get involved in a newspaper that was struggling to be born. He has not looked back.
Glenn Lall created history when he got involved in the printing business back in 1997. He was not the sole owner back then, but he knew what a newspaper should be and it was not long before he bought out everyone else.
The paper, Kaieteur News, was a weekly back then, with an edition that hit the streets on Fridays. This was so for five years when Lall did the unthinkable. At the time there was the view that the two dailies, Chronicle and Stabroek News, had saturated the market.
Glenn Lall took the bold decision to enter the fray so he opted to increase the frequency of his newspaper. A Monday edition appeared, and then a Sunday edition. Within weeks Lall introduced a Wednesday to be followed by a Tuesday and a Thursday. The last, the Saturday edition, came and all this in 2003 including a newspaper that made its appearance in New York as a weekly and continues to do so. It is now the most sought after newspaper in New York. Two years ago the paper appeared as a biweekly in Orlando, Florida. The Kaieteur News is available on the web where it is again the leading online newpaper out of Guyana.
The newspaper is also the leading newspaper in Guyana. This happened because Lall not only opened the pages to the wider society, to people who had no voice, but he also focused on issues that affected them as opposed to concentrating only on the business class and the people who influenced decisions.
The paper is heading for its 20th anniversary and today, full credit to the first descendant of Indians to own and publish a newspaper in Guyana.
Those early days were not easy. Lall took to selling the paper almost single handedly standing in the road and offering the paper to passing motorists. It was some time before that extremely small circulation disappeared into households.
Innovation is always the tool to expansion and Lall innovated with columns that people had not even dreamed of. Two columns that have stood the time and still have readers going wild are ‘Dem Boys Seh’ and ‘The Baccoo speaks.’
There was a time when the paper featured on its front page, pretty girls, merely to capture readers. Those days are long past.
It is apposite to note that Kaieteur News was not the only publication to come off the press. There was the racy publication ‘Flame’ and one that remains to this day, ‘Starburst.’
People want him to produce an evening paper but he knows that they do not last so he continues to be the consummate publisher, leaving behind the stalls where he started his life as a businessman.