The state of things
The media worldwide is facing profound changes to how the industry works, yet the (mainstream) Nigerian media is standing by, watching, and largely doing nothing.
The Nigerian media is fucked, and the most surprising thing is, save for a handful of people, not a lot people seem to care. The traditional gatekeepers of journalism (newspapers) in this country certainly don’t give a hoot about the quality of what they’re churning out daily.
MTV News laid off its entire editorial staff this week in a bid to pivot to video. Words, apparently, aren’t in vogue anymore, and this is akin to when newspapers the world over were falling all over themselves for a coherent digital strategy not too long ago. Needless to say I believe (quality) written journalism is the present and future of the industry rather than silly auto play videos everyone pauses as fast as they can.
This follows recent layoffs at Vocativ, Fox Sports, HuffPost as digital media outlets favour video over written word, and it got me thinking about the state of the media in this country. In theory this means we’re still a few steps behind in the race towards making video content the core of our editorial strategy; at this stage we’re still figuring how to make words on a screen work.
It’s not novel to suggest newspapers are dying a slow and painful death, indeed the best newspapers in the world are all adapting to the challenges posed by the internet. The New York Times and the Washington Post are experiencing a bump in the number of digital subscriptions as revenues from print advertising dwindles with each passing day; on the other hand, the U.K. Independent shut down its newspaper entirely to become what it called the first all digital newspaper. Yet in the face of a worldwide threat to their industry, Nigerian newspapers are failing — due to ineptitude or a lack of willpower, or both — to adapt to meet new demands. The worrying thing is it’s at the simple things they’re failing. Take a cursory glance at the websites of the major newspapers in this country and one thing is as clear as a lovely summer day: their websites are a smouldering mess of low-res images and retardation not fit enough for a personal blog, let alone the digital arm of a national news provider. Forget highly paid consultants and ‘digital nomads’ telling newspapers how to stay afloat in this digital-first era, there’s one simple advice I’d give them all for free: if your website looks worse than the work of a 3 year-old let loose in a room full of crayons and takes forever to load, your strategy will fail and your newspaper will die slowly but surely. I get my local news from Guardian Nigeria largely because they’re the only ones with a website that isn’t a dumpster fire of nonsense.
The ubiquity of the internet in Nigeria has done a lot of good, and nowhere is this more prominent than the democratisation of news: with a few steps just about anyone can be their own editor and reporter. It’s lowered the bar for entry into journalism, without which someone like me would never dream of trying out for a career in the industry. The inability of the traditional gatekeepers to evolve with the times has led to a rise of a decentralised army of blogs and new media outlets taking the lead in what is essentially still a new field. The developed world may have figured out how to make digital media work but it’s still very much in its infancy here. And this is where the problem stems from.
The absence of a path to follow, a guide basically, means the lowered bar has led to an explosion in the quantity of what passes for digital media in this country with quality the unfortunate victim of a race to the bottom in the effort for clicks and eyeballs. Have you ever wondered why the leading media companies mostly produce fluff, click-bait pieces/videos with zero attention paid to the basic norms of fact-checking and truthfulness? How often do we see a media company get it wrong so spectacularly in its reporting or rumour-mongering? It’s a sad indictment of how things work that the number one digital media company peddles repackaged copy and paste stories with no acknowledgement of sources and truth is an inconvenient factor that is never allowed to get in the way of fabrications.
Now, it would be intellectual snobbery to suggest there isn’t a place for fluff pieces and stories, or to suggest only tightly-edited The New Yorker-style articles are the only things that pass for quality pieces in digital media. Before BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith as Editor-In-Chief and made its own pivot to serious news in 2012, it was popular for its listicles and viral content which still keeps the lights on till this day. The equivalent of that in Nigeria would be Big Cabal Media’s Zikoko, which has proven to be wildly successful for two main reasons in my opinion. The content is undeniably funny; and secondly perhaps more importantly (to me at least) is the clutter-free and neat layout of the website that makes navigation easy and fast. On the other end of the scale is The Republic, a magazine that publishes essays and commentary on topics exploring Nigeria, Africa and the world at large. TechCabal, the technology website and another BCM property, is also an industry leader because of its commitment to simplicity and getting the story right.
In the end, I believe there is a need for quality digital storytelling in Nigeria, and as the aforementioned trio of outlets currently show, there is a concerted effort by a few people to make stuff that is visually appealing, simple and truthful, regardless of the category of content being produced. The race to the bottom by leading digital outlets and the failure of newspapers to adapt to a changing shouldn’t define the face of our media in a country filled with capable young people committed to doing the right thing.
- Full disclosure: I do not work for any of the publications cited here and they’re only mentioned based on my knowledge of following their work from a distance.
