The newscast, formerly called ‘The 6 O’Clock News’, now boasts two beauties - in the person of former Miss Guyana Universe and World contenders, Misses Petal DeSantos and Olive Gopaul - and Messrs Wilfred Cameron and Duane Fowler, as anchors.

Both Fowler - who has also been retained as Newsroom Coordinator - and Cameron previously worked as anchors with other rival newscasts.

Former Editor-in-Chief, Mr. Vishham Ramsaywack, who sometimes doubled as anchor, is now Editor, a position he shares with ‘Guyana Today’ co-host and veteran theatre personality, Mr. Nazim Hussain.

The position of Editor-in-Chief is now vacant, sources say.

Mr. Neaz Subhan, who is on loan from the Government Information News Agency (GINA), has been made Head of a totally new department, for which a name is yet to be found, but which will, in effect, be responsible for the creativity and quality of the graphics used in programming.

With these key positions out of the way, said new General Manager, Mr. Mohamed Sattaur, who took over the helm last October, the regular reporters, who were sometimes roped in as anchors, can now concentrate on being just journalists.

“They don’t present the news anymore…because it was asking too much of them to come in and do a full day’s work and still expect them to go back and present again,” Sattaur said.

And, in the interest of brevity, news stories are now being restricted to one-and-a-half to two minutes, thus making them a whole lot crisper. The first half-hour is relegated to regular news, and the final half to primarily features.

“So every day, we’ll have half hour of news, half hour of features. And then you have sports,” he said.

Among other revolutionary changes to have swept the Homestretch Avenue facility of late, in the hope of making its programmes more viewer-friendly, is the installation of a whole range of new state-of-the-art equipment, which, according to Sattaur, is responsible for the improved quality of the graphics we now see in the newscast.

The new news-desk, which is also state-of-the-art, is courtesy of the local manufacturing firm, FibreTech. The newsroom, which was formerly located on the ground floor of the building, has now been moved one floor up.

Asked whose idea it was to shake up things at the State-run television station, which turned 10 on April 1, Sattaur said the credit belongs to no one person in particular, but everyone in the company.

“We basically did an analysis of what the programming at GTV was… and I quickly realised that the newscast was the flagship programme. So, we concentrated basically on setting the standards by revamping the news,” he said.

Not that there was anything wrong with the old formatting, he hastened to assure.

“The thing is, it was just like every other newscast in Guyana,” meaning that stories were much too long and not as brisk as those on CNN. Neither was there any in-depth features nor human-interest content to speak of.

“What we wanted was to move a step above the rest,” he said.

Among those invited to make an input as to how the Company should go about restructuring the newsroom in general, were veteran journalists Messrs Vic Insanally, Carlton James, Adam Harris and Enrico Woolford.

Initial steps taken last November to introduce a news magazine with some new graphics and better standards among other programme-enhancing qualities, he said, were shelved after a three-week run since the newsroom as it stood then did not have the capacity to undertake such a task.

“We tried to do it on Saturdays only,” he explained, “but we still couldn’t get all the new features and graphics in for just a day; it was impossible for them to do something like this on a day to day basis. So what we had to do was re-organise the entire newsroom.”

Noting that ‘Guyana Today’ and ‘Homestretch Magazine’ are but a few of the programmes that will be similarly metamorphosed as the newscast, Sattaur said they had initially tried coming out with their ‘new-look’ on May 1, but were prevented from doing so by technical problems.

Asked whether he and his team of trouble-shooters have been able to meet all the goals they have set themselves, Sattaur replied in the negative saying they still had a long way to go yet in bringing the programmes up to the desired standard.

Among new programmes launched in past few weeks, he said, is one called ‘Indian Top 10’, which is aired at 09:00hrs on Saturdays and rebroadcast during the week, and another called ‘Anmol Geet’ aired Sundays at 07:00hrs.

New also is the ‘GTV Sports Magazine’ hosted by Sean Devers, and another called ‘The Cook & Craft Show’.