In 1917, an ad­ven­tur­ous group of pi­o­neers took the bold step of set­ting up the Trinidad Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny. It was a bold step for sev­er­al rea­sons-at that time putting one's mon­ey in the news­pa­per busi­ness was a ter­ri­bly risky thing as there had been sev­er­al failed news­pa­pers dur­ing the three pre­vi­ous decades and it was prob­a­bly the worst of times to be start­ing a busi­ness high­ly de­pen­dent on im­port­ed pa­per, at the height of World War I (1914-1918), with the pos­si­bil­i­ty that newsprint sup­plies might be in­con­sis­tent. It was in this sce­nario that a fear­less group of en­tre­pre­neurs took the plunge and set up the Trinidad Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny to pub­lish the Trinidad Guardian. The com­pa­ny was in­cor­po­rat­ed on June 28, 1917, with a paid-up cap­i­tal of $23,000, op­er­at­ing from rent­ed premis­es at 22 St Vin­cent Street in down­town Port-of-Spain. The first di­rec­tors were George F Hug­gins, AH Wight, Al­bert H Cipri­ani, Ed­ward H Pitts, T Ged­des Grant and LAP O'Reil­ly. The first edi­tion of the Guardian hit the streets ex­act­ly 95 years ago to­day, on Sun­day, Sep­tem­ber 2, 1917.

The edi­tion was all of eight pages and it sig­nalled the birth of the "War Ba­by" news­pa­per which was sold at pen­ny (two cents). The for­mat of the pub­li­ca­tion was strange com­pared to to­day's de­sign stan­dards since all the ads were laid out on Page one. In all, 1,500 copies of that first edi­tion were print­ed on a sec­ond-hand Brem­mer press ac­quired from the then de­funct Mir­ror news­pa­per. The aim and ob­jec­tive of the ear­ly Guardian pi­o­neers were "to en­cour­age al­ways the de­vel­op­ment of Trinidad, her peo­ple and re­sources." Per­son­al fi­nan­cial in­puts and sac­ri­fice by di­rec­tors and ad­min­is­tra­tive staff were the hall­marks of the ear­ly be­gin­nings. The premis­es at 22 St Vin­cent Street were a one-door two-storey build­ing rent­ed at $60 month­ly un­der a five-year lease. For the first decade of its ex­is­tence the com­pa­ny's di­rec­tors made no charge on the com­pa­ny for their ser­vices and ac­cept­ed the to­ken sum of $5 for each meet­ing at­tend­ed. Through these many self­less ef­forts, the Guardian grew from strength to strength. By 1929, the com­pa­ny took its first gi­ant step. No 22 St Vin­cent Street was re­built and a new Cos­sar press was in­stalled with a ca­pac­i­ty to print 4,000 copies of the Guardian an hour.

Through­out its ex­is­tence the Guardian has been a bold pi­o­neer and dur­ing the 30s the news­pa­per emerged as a tru­ly con­cerned cor­po­rate cit­i­zen which spear­head­ed sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ty projects:

• Es­tab­lish­ment of the still on-go­ing Guardian Need­i­est Cas­es Fund in 1934.

• Set­ting up of the Chest Hos­pi­tal Fund in 1935, so­lic­it­ing pub­lic do­na­tions and col­lect­ing some $53,000 by 1938 which was hand­ed over to the Gov­ern­ment to con­struct the Cau­ra Sana­to­ri­um.

• Launched the Fight­er Fund as a con­tri­bu­tion to boost the British ef­fort fol­low­ing the out­break of World War II.

The Guardian was al­so at the fore­front in its sup­port for lo­cal cul­ture and was in­stru­men­tal in start­ing Car­ni­val shows in the Sa­van­nah be­gin­ning with the King and Queen com­pe­ti­tion. It was a Guardian em­ploy­ee, Eu­stace Ward, who came up with the idea of "The Band of the Year" and it was the Guardian which gave sub­stance to the Ca­lyp­so King com­pe­ti­tion. The Guardian al­so opened its columns to pro­mote sup­port for the steel­band move­ment. The self­less­ness and courage of the pi­o­neers laid the sol­id ground­work up­on which the out­stand­ing suc­cess of the Guardian over the 95 years of op­er­a­tion has been based. It is this com­mit­ment to de­vel­op­ing Trinidad that en­abled the Guardian to firm­ly es­tab­lish it­self as a na­tion­al and re­gion­al in­sti­tu­tion. The news­pa­per has seen its fair share of tri­als hav­ing faced two world wars, the 1970s, the fire in 1980 which de­stroyed the build­ing and the 1990 in­sur­rec­tion.

De­spite these chal­lenges, the com­pa­ny has made sev­er­al ad­vances over the news. What be­gan as Trinidad Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny, with the Trinidad Guardian as its sole prod­uct, has evolved in­to Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed which now al­so op­er­ates five ra­dio broad­cast­ing sta­tions-In­spi­ra­tional Ra­dio 730 AM, The Best Mix 95.1 FM, the Vibe CT105 FM, Sangeet 106.1 FM, and Aakash Vani 106.5 FM- as well as a tele­vi­sion sta­tion, Ca­ble News Chan­nel Three. The news­pa­per, which be­gan as a broad­sheet, changed to tabloid for­mat, known as the "G-size Guardian," in No­vem­ber 2002. In June 2008, the pa­per changed to a small­er tabloid. In 2008 the Guardian mod­ernised its pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ties, in­vest­ing in state-of-the-art equip­ment, which al­lows the com­pa­ny to bol­ster its pro­duc­tion process, fa­cil­i­tate the high­est qual­i­ty stan­dards of pro­duc­tion out­put and de­liv­er a va­ri­ety of niche prod­ucts to our read­ers and ad­ver­tis­ers in a rapid­ly chang­ing mar­ket.