Yaad gathers Jamaican news from Jamaican newsrooms and sends you to them. It publishes nothing of its own.
Why this exists
If you live outside Jamaica and rely on the press around you, the country arrives in two shapes. It is a beach with a soundtrack, or it is a murder figure. Almost nothing in between gets commissioned — not the Budget, not a by-election, not the bauxite industry, not a Court of Appeal ruling.
That flattening has a documented history. Through the 1990s British newspapers built a “Yardie” menace that researchers who examined the actual crime data found had been inflated well past what the evidence supported — and most of the men so labelled turned out to be British-born children of Windrush-era migrants, reclassified as a foreign threat. Jamaican sprinting success gets explained by suspicion or by bodies, where other countries get credited with coaching and investment. Jamaica's laws on homosexuality have been condemned at length by the same British press that wrote them, in 1864, and left behind. Debt has been reported as mismanagement rather than as terms imposed.
None of this requires anyone to have acted in bad faith. Foreign desks are thin and run on narratives that are cheap and quick to recognise. Crime and beaches are both. The result is the same either way: a country of three million people, which gave the world Marcus Garvey, Louise Bennett, Claude McKay, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, is legible abroad mainly through what frightens or entertains.
The correction isn't to argue back. It is to make the actual reporting easy to reach. Jamaican newsrooms already cover Jamaica properly, every day, for Jamaicans. Yaad is a front door to them.
How it works
Yaad reads the public feeds of the newsrooms listed below and shows you the headline, a short excerpt, and a link. The link goes to the outlet's own page. Full stories live on the publishers' sites, where they belong, and where the journalists who wrote them are credited and counted.
- Every card names the outlet that reported it.
- Nothing is rewritten, summarised or translated. Headlines and excerpts appear as the publisher supplied them.
- Where a publisher's terms allow only a headline, that is all you see.
- Entertainment coverage is capped on the front page and has its own section, so releases and reviews don't crowd out national news.
Non-commercial
Yaad carries no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate links and no paid placement. Nothing on this site can be bought. There is no tracking, no analytics profile of you, and no newsletter list.
This isn't only principle. Most publishers' feed terms permit non-commercial use and nothing more. Staying non-commercial is what makes it possible to carry these outlets at all, and to ask the ones that require permission for it directly.
Publishers
If you are a publisher and want your outlet added, changed, restricted to headlines only, or removed entirely, write to us. Removal requests are honoured without argument or delay.
Corrections and takedowns
Yaad does not report, so it cannot correct a story — that has to go to the outlet that published it. What Yaad can fix is anything wrong on this site: a misattributed source, a broken or wrong link, a story that shouldn't be here. Write to [email protected] and it will be dealt with.
Who runs it
Yaad is built and maintained by the team behind Rasanblaj, a news aggregator for Haiti and its diaspora. The two sites run on the same software and the same rules. More countries will follow, each with its own newsrooms, its own language, and its own front door.