In a bid to re­main rel­e­vant in this dig­i­tal age, the Trinidad Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed is seek­ing a new di­rec­tion.

The 93 year-old com­pa­ny has re­brand­ed it­self and it is now known as the Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed (GML). Speak­ing at the of­fi­cial launch of the re­named com­pa­ny at the Hy­att Ho­tel yes­ter­day, GML man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Gabriel Faria said: "Guardian Me­dia is on the lead­ing edge of tru­ly con­verg­ing our tra­di­tion­al and new me­dia plat­forms, con­nect­ing to con­sumers on their terms and to suit their lifestyles.

"The en­vi­ron­ment is chang­ing at the speed of light-to sur­vive and more­so pros­per we must not on­ly em­brace it, we must be on the lead­ing edge of change where we cre­ate the land­scape for the fu­ture. Not fol­low­ing the road but cre­at­ing new paths and let­ting oth­ers fol­low us."

"It em­braces the dig­i­tal age we are op­er­at­ing in and clear­ly sig­nals our mul­ti­me­dia strength which we will lever­age to the ben­e­fit our cus­tomers and the 700,000 con­nec­tions we have with con­sumers every­day," he said at the on Tues­day. Faria boast­ed that GML's mul­ti­di­men­sion­al cam­paign across its me­dia net­work will keep con­sumers con­nect­ed. It's not just a name change. "It is a fun­da­men­tal shift in how we will do busi­ness go­ing for­ward. We clear­ly un­der­stand our role in con­nect­ing you to your con­sumers and that we must sat­is­fy our three stake­hold­ers to suc­ceed," he said. To sup­port this change, the com­pa­ny has in­vest­ed in tech­nol­o­gy, hu­man cap­i­tal, con­sumer in­sights and con­tent. The com­pa­ny will now of­fer on­line clas­si­fieds.

"We have in­tro­duced the most ad­vanced & com­pre­hen­sive on line clas­si­fieds with a map­ping struc­ture specif­i­cal­ly set up for Trinidad. Our cus­tomers can up­load their own pho­tos or video of the homes, cars or any­thing they want to sell. Our e-com­merce pack­age al­so al­lows you to pay for it on line with your cred­it card. This will change the land­scape of clas­si­fied ad­ver­tis­ing. We will al­so be in­tro­duc­ing ad­di­tion­al fea­tures ear­ly next year. The ad­ver­tis­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties here are lim­it­less," he said. Faria point­ed out that while the news­pa­per in­dus­try in the US and some oth­er first world mar­kets are go­ing through chal­lenges the sta­tis­tics show that the in­dus­try in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca con­tin­ues to be ex­treme­ly strong as be­ha­vo­r­ial pat­terns are dif­fer­ent.

To this end, the com­pa­ny has in­tro­duced a Spe­cial Pub­li­ca­tions Unit. The SPU cre­ates cre­ates a num­ber of fo­cused "mag­a­zines" which are not on­ly dis­trib­uted through our dai­ly pa­per but al­so through di­rect dis­tri­b­u­tion to hun­dreds of out­lets which cater to the spe­cif­ic con­sumer. Faria not­ed that guardian.co.tt will now pro­vide the most com­pre­hen­sive news and en­ter­tain­ment por­tal in T&T-the Guardian News­pa­per, stream­ing of CNC3 news, oth­er cur­rent af­fairs con­tent and video on de­mand. "There is no me­dia group who can do this bet­ter than we can. We of­fer the most com­pre­hen­sive plat­form to cast your mes­sage to the widest base of con­sumers by mul­ti­ple nich­es and di­verse de­mo­graph­ics through our un­matched mul­ti­me­dia ca­pa­bil­i­ty," he said.