Prof. J Robinson – Eye of the Needle
On Friday, September 25 2026, Searchlight will be on the news stands for the last time after 31 years of publication. For a small new nation, just 47 years old, that is sixty-five percent of our memory as an independent nation.
The name was a statement as it recalled a call-in programme on the national radio station that had been shut down by the government of the day. Searchlight was born out of a silenced voice and it is worth remembering that as the lights go down.
Searchlight is not alone as its closure follows that of several newspapers. Newspapers the world over struggle to pay their way as print circulation and advertising revenue are down and audiences and advertisers keep moving to digital platforms that ironically depend on content from newspapers.
Price Is Not Value
I want to introduce you to a book, ‘Bullshit Jobs’, by David Graeber where he argues that the more clearly a person’s work benefits others, the less that person tends to be paid. Nurses, teachers, sanitation workers and care workers hold society together and are paid modestly. We all know the pattern. Graeber’s point was that price is only one way of measuring value but it is not the only way, and often not the wisest.
Mariana Mazzucato makes a related argument in ‘The Value of Everything’. Once we let price define value, we lose the ability to tell value creation from value extraction and by definition, whatever earns money becomes “productive,” and whatever cannot earn money becomes a cost to be cut. Adam Smith saw the puzzle in the eighteenth century. Water is essential to life and nearly free, while diamonds are useless and expensive.
A Public Good
A newspaper is one of the clearest examples of this gap between price and value. Economists call journalism a public good as my reading it does not stop you from reading it, and its benefits spread far beyond those who paid for it.
I am sure we all know the guy who never buys a paper but reads it at work or at the shop counter. I want you to consider the minister who changes course because a reporter asked an awkward question. Think of the court report that keeps a magistrate careful, the obituary that honours a life, and the letter-writer from the Grenadines who finally feels heard. None of these people wrote a cheque to Searchlight but all of them were served by it. Markets undervalue and undersupply goods like these.
The Irony
I want to point you documents unveiled, by a newspaper, which form part of a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. In a 2023 internal document, Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, called AI scraping “the largest theft of labor in human history”.
He also described large AI models as “a product that destroys its supply chain”, meaning their dependence on the work of publishers, journalists and other creators. An OpenAI executive warned that AI products posed an “existential threat” to publishers.
The economics are so ironic as the stock market values the newspaper at close to nothing but the machine that digests the newspaper is valued in the hundreds of billions. It’s a Bullshit market.
Cane To Content
Caribbean people should recognize this pattern. Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt described the plantation economy as one in which raw material was produced here, value added and captured elsewhere.
Our words, our reporting and our record of ourselves are now raw material too, they are harvested at no cost, refined in distant data centres and then sold back to us as answers, with no link to the reporter who did the work. Cane has given way to content, and the structure of the arrangement has barely changed.
To everyone at Searchlight, past and present, I say thank you. You kept a record of a nation, argued with it, and held it to account for 31 years and whatever the market says, that work was valuable.
Markets measure the wrong things and we the public are at fault as we must stop treating precious things as though they are free.
- Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus
