Vet­er­an broad­cast jour­nal­ist Ju­lian Rogers has been ap­point­ed a Mem­ber of the Most Ex­cel­lent Or­der of the British Em­pire (MBE) for ser­vices to Broad­cast­ing in the Queen's birth­day ho­n­ours list. News of the ho­n­our was re­leased yes­ter­day.

Bar­ba­dos-born Rogers, who has more than 45 years' ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing in tele­vi­sion, ra­dio and print across the re­gion, said he had known of the ho­n­our for a few weeks but the re­al­i­ty on­ly hit yes­ter­day when peo­ple from all over the world flood­ed his phone, email and Face­book pages with spe­cial salutes.He said he spent most of the day "savour­ing the con­grat­u­la­tions from fam­i­ly, friends and pro­fes­sion­al col­leagues".

Rogers was based in T&T from 1993 to 1998, first as gen­er­al man­ag­er of the now de­funct Prime Ra­dio 106, a sub­sidiary of Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Net­work (CCN), then as an an­chor on TV6. He pi­o­neered break­fast tele­vi­sion in T&T, launch­ing this coun­try's first live morn­ing tele­vi­sion talk show, the Morn­ing Edi­tion, with pro­duc­er Na­tal­ie Williams.Rogers was al­so part of the orig­i­nal team ap­point­ed to re­brand Trinidad and To­ba­go Tele­vi­sion (TTT) in­to CN­MG.

How­ev­er, in 1998 he found him­self at the cen­tre of a con­tro­ver­sy when then prime min­is­ter Bas­deo Pan­day re­fused to re­new his work per­mit. This led to wide­spread protests by many who felt the move was mo­ti­vat­ed by the fact that many guests on the Morn­ing Edi­tion had been crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment.

Rogers moved on to an­oth­er job out­side T&T, host­ing the very suc­cess­ful Talk­ing Caribbean (1998�2000), a tele­vi­sion talk show fea­tur­ing hour-long in­ter­views which was the Caribbean Broad­cast­ing Union's first at­tempt at live in­ter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion.

In re­cent years, Rogers has won ac­co­lades for his live broad­casts, in­clud­ing his 2007 cov­er­age of gen­er­al elec­tions in T&T, the in­au­gur­al cer­e­mo­ny of the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ), which took place here in April 2005 and his com­men­tary at the No­vem­ber 2010 state fu­ner­al of Bar­ba­di­an Prime Min­is­ter David Thomp­son.

Now based in based in An­tigua & Bar­bu­da, Rogers served there as a con­sul­tant in the set­ting up of Ob­serv­er Ra­dio and gen­er­al man­ag­er of the Ob­serv­er Me­dia Group com­pris­ing two ra­dio sta­tions–Ob­serv­er Ra­dio and Hitz FM–as well as the Dai­ly Ob­serv­er news­pa­per