Photo: (l-r) Abil Castaneda, Director of Quality Management and Capacity Development, B.T.B.; and Louis Wade III, scholarship recipient
by Charles Gladden
BELIZE CITY, Wed. Dec. 7, 2022
At a small ceremony held in the Belize Tourism Board conference room in Belize City on Wednesday, December 7, Louis Wade III, a journalist at Plus TV, was presented with BTB’s first Media Broadcasting Scholarship.
Wade will be traveling to the CSB Media Arts Center in Palm Beach, Florida, where he will take part in an eight-week training program conducted by experts in the field, which is valued at 42,000 dollars.
Despite being one of the youngest members of the local media, Wade remarked that he is in a good position to learn how to speak for the current generation.
“I’ve been to Africa this year to cover news stories, and now I am going to Miami on a scholarship. I look forward to this journey, although it sounds tedious, but I am pretty sure it will be fun, so I am excited. Being one of the youngest in this field in Belize, there is a lot for me to learn, because I’m just twenty-four years old. I started news when I was twenty-years old, so I am very young in it. I feel that being young, I am in a good spot to tell stories that my generation needs to tell and stories that my generation needs to hear as well,” he said.
Director of Quality Management and Capacity Development at the Belize Tourism Board, Abil Castaneda, noted that Wade will be witnessing how the large media companies in America operate.
“One thing with CSB Media Arts Center is that they have a great mix of theoretical, but they incline more towards the practical. They are going to work in a studio. As I was mentioning to Mr. Wade, they will have internships where they will be able to go and see how the big boys do it – the ESPNs and the NBCs and the affiliates there in Florida. We like the approach that they provide — a practical sort of entry into what broadcast media is, but we also like that their instructors are actually people that work in the media like yourselves that have been in the sector for twenty-thirty years, that bring a wealth of experience of what to do and the little tricks of the trade,” Castaneda said.
Wade is expected to depart for Florida in March of 2023.