An­na-Lisa Paul

"A breath of fresh air."

That is how pro­gramme con­sul­tant Jessie-May Ven­tour de­scribed Sky 99.5 FM, Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed's (GML) newest ra­dio sta­tion and the lat­est to join the FM band­width.

The sta­tion took over from 730 AM, whose ra­dio trans­mit­ter was switched off at mid­night on March 31. The sta­tion re­tained the ser­vices of some per­son­al­i­ties in­clud­ing Ed­di­son Carr, Eu­gene Manuel, Corey Joseph and Ronald De La Rosa.

The sta­tion was born out of the love, hard work and com­mit­ment that sus­tained Ra­dio 730 AM for close to 70 years, Ven­tour said.

Bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of ra­dio sta­tions in T&T to 33, the sound­waves of Sky 99.5 FM will be dom­i­nat­ed by gospel mu­sic "but with a twist," said pro­gramme di­rec­tor Mar­cus Romero, who promised a mix of "good news and hard news."

Lis­ten­ers can look for­ward to re­ports, up­dates and analy­sis on news sto­ries un­fold­ing in re­al-time, in some cas­es di­rect­ly from the jour­nal­ists work­ing on those sto­ries.

Romero said the sta­tion's reper­toire of mu­sic would sur­prise au­di­ences, as it in­clud­ed gospel of­fer­ings which were new to the mar­ket, jazz, con­tem­po­rary, and a heavy in­jec­tion of lo­cal mu­sic, which would en­tice lis­ten­ers.

The pro­gram­ming tar­gets peo­ple on the go, be­tween the ages of 25 and 54. Ven­tour and Romero agreed that this de­mo­graph­ic kept chang­ing dai­ly as "more and more peo­ple, some younger and some old­er, were con­tin­u­ing to tune in." Ven­tour said no ex­pense was spared to en­sure that they reached the widest pos­si­ble au­di­ence, both lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

Ven­tour said the gospel pro­gram­ming was just the thing that was need­ed to "get the day start­ed right," as it would in­form, in­spire and em­pow­er lis­ten­ers.

The sta­tion will al­so fea­ture morn­ing shows on week­ends.

"Sky 99.5FM will in­tro­duce a sev­en-day morn­ing show, a first in the T&T mar­ket," said Guardian Me­dia Group's head of ra­dio Steve Dip­nar­ine.

"We'll have the Break­fast Round­table Week­day and The Week­end Round Ta­ble host­ed by the in­dus­try's most re­spect­ed me­dia pro­fes­sion­als, and in­dus­try ex­perts from var­i­ous fields."

Dip­nar­ine de­scribed Sky as a cut­ting-edge of­fer­ing, pro­vid­ing more than a ra­dio ser­vice.

"We will be con­verg­ing ter­res­tri­al and on­line with video and au­dio HD tech­nol­o­gy to meet lis­ten­ers on their terms–where they want to en­joy con­tent, and how they want to en­joy con­tent."