In February 2023, Nigeria headed to the polls for the sixth time since the country’s return to democratic governance. But unlike the previous five elections, this one had an extra layer of complexity. For the first time in Nigerian history, there was a credible third contender, the usual two-legged race was now three-legged. As uncertainty mounted in the days leading up to the elections, Stears, a pan-African data company, released its predictions based on an opinion poll conducted on over 6,000 Nigerians.
A few weeks after the elections had come and gone, not only did Stears accurately predict the outcome of the polls, but its digital election tracker had been one of the primary reference points for thousands of voters. The platform saw a 5,000% increase in user visits than estimated. It was a win for Stears’ consumer-facing division, but it was also its last dance.
Aside from the election tracker, this division also produced a COVID-19 live monitor during the pandemic, but its most popular product by far was Stears Premium, its subscription insights product containing a range of content, from news and analysis to opinion pieces and investigative deep dives on issues around the economy, tech, business, and government policy.
As Nigerians prepared for a new government, Stears was winding down its consumer-facing division and redirecting most of its editorial resources to its enterprise business.
]]>“We would have failed our people and the future generation if we sleep on artificial intelligence because these are a set of technologies that will control what you think, how you think, and how you do everything.” One year into his tenure as Nigeria’s Minister of Information, Communication, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, was giving a passionate defense of his AI-first policy approach during a fireside chat with Tomiwa Aladekomo, CEO of Big Cabal Media (BCM), at Moonshot, a tech conference organized in Lagos, Nigeria.
The previous year, Bosun Tijani had used the maiden edition of the conference as the platform to explain his strategy to train three million young Nigerians in technical skills. Moonshot was the perfect opportunity for him. There, in the air-conditioned halls of the Eko Convention Centre, hundreds of stakeholders had gathered to discuss the most pressing issues in the country’s tech ecosystem and across the continent. Innovation was center stage, and after Tijani’s session, a slew of tech ecosystem leaders followed, explaining the innovative ways they were using technology to solve the continent’s most challenging problems. They were all brought together by TechCabal.
This year’s Moonshot, held from October 9-10, attracted over 4,000 attendees, nearly double what it did last year.
Big Cabal Media, TechCabal’s parent company, is no stranger to innovation. It had come back from the brink of demise to define what innovation meant—from new storytelling formats to novel funding mechanisms — for Nigeria’s media industry.
Moonshot was another exercise in defining what was possible for Nigerian media, and it has been wildly successful. But it also made me begin to think about another company, also a market leader, which had come back from the brink of demise to define what innovation meant for several industries, including media, for over a decade. That company is Apple.
In 1997, 12 years after he departed from Apple, Steve Jobs returned to a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Jobs acted quickly to save the sinking ship, terminating several projects and streamlining the company’s product focus while also empowering a young British industrial designer to lead the design of new products. The results were immediate. A year after his return, Apple released the iMac G3; its translucent, all-in-one case set new standards for aesthetics in personal computing design, and the resulting sales helped Apple recover from the threat of bankruptcy.
Building on the success of the iMac, Apple went on a product development spree over the next 12 years. Products like the iPod, iPhone, and MacBook redefined excellence in their individual product categories, immediately gaining market share while competitors struggled to catch up with copycats. A little over a year after he launched the iPad, Steve Jobs succumbed to pancreatic cancer, leaving the company in the hands of his trusted operations executive, Tim Cook.
Tim Cook’s biggest contribution to Apple has been efficiency. He was the architect of the company’s move to outsource manufacturing of Apple products to Asia, helping reduce costs. Under his leadership, Apple’s market value has increased more than sevenfold, but product innovation has slowed down.
Granted, Apple has launched new product categories like the Apple Watch and AirPods, which have been successful in their own right. But none have been as successful as the iPhone, and the success of these new devices can be attributed to dependence on the iPhone. The iPhone remains the company’s biggest revenue driver. This is concerning, as iPhone sales have already begun to slow down.
Apple has instead focused on a new push into providing digital services like Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Card, a strategy that relies on an ecosystem of existing Apple products, of which the iPhone is the core. If Apple is a products company that is now becoming a services company, then BCM is a publications company that is now becoming an events company.
In 2022, Tomiwa Aladekomo, not long after BCM’s $2.2 million raise, defined the thesis of the business on Founder’s Connect, a business video series: “The original thesis of BCM is to build robust and important publications in niche spaces.”
BCM had followed this blueprint from its inception in 2014, starting with TechCabal, a blog that soon became the publication of record for Nigeria’s tech ecosystem. Building on the success of TechCabal, BCM launched Zikoko, a youth and culture publication. The BuzzFeed-like site quickly gained popularity with its humorous takes on pop culture. Then things started to go wrong.
An earlier edition of Communiqué detailed the troubles at BCM:
“BCM also went through a rough patch in 2017 that saw poor management decisions and infighting lead to a loss of momentum and an identity crisis. During this period, the company’s co-founders split. In 2018, the board brought in Tomiwa Aladekomo, the former MD of Ventra Media Group. Aladekomo had helped to digitally transform one of Nigeria’s legacy publishers, Guardian Nigeria. Now, his task was to steady the BCM ship and set course for new territories.”
Aladekomo’s takeover marked the beginning of a new BCM. Fu’ad Lawal, a Pulse.ng writer who had become popular for his trip around Nigeria’s 36 states, joined the company to become Zikoko’s editor-in-chief. When Lawal wrote the first Naira Life, the trajectory of Zikoko changed irrevocably. The company took the Naira Life format and replicated it across several other topics, spinning out new verticals on sex, love, and masculinity. A new Zikoko was born. For TechCabal, stories had become more in-depth, fulfilling the long-held media role of watchdog for the Nigerian tech ecosystem.
TechCabal has always hosted events like TC Townhall as part of its product offering, but beginning in 2021, there has been a new focus on events for the whole BCM. Z Fest, Hertitude, and Future of Commerce joined the company’s lineup. In 2023, Future of Commerce expanded to become Moonshot, and Burning Ram, a food festival, was launched.
However, BCM has not succeeded in developing any new publications. Ahead of the 2023 Nigerian general elections, Zikoko’s politics and civic engagement vertical, Citizen, was spun off as a new publication. Citizen reached over 5 million people during the elections, but this was not enough to sustain it. In August 2023, it was downscaled from a full publication back to a Zikoko vertical, with most of its team laid off. At the time, BCM cited harsh market conditions as the reason for the layoffs. Similarly, Apple recently shut down its effort to develop an electric car.
BCM’s push into events offers several key benefits that complement its existing media business. First, events provide an opportunity to diversify and increase revenue streams beyond traditional advertising and content monetization. With ticket sales, sponsorship deals, and branded partnerships, events can become a significant source of income. Second, hosting events allows BCM to strengthen its relationship with its audience by offering in-person experiences that build a sense of community and deepen audience loyalty. These events bring readers closer to the brand, giving them direct access to the people behind the publications and creating memorable, engaging experiences that foster long-term connections. Also, events are a powerful tool for brand building, as they position BCM not just as a publisher but as a key player in driving conversations, cultural movements, and thought leadership within the communities and industries it serves.
However, there are some concerns about the company’s new focus on events:
Events depend on publication IP: There is a symbiotic relationship between BCM’s publications and its events business. Think of it like the relationship between Disney’s films and theme parks, where the theme park experiences are built around movies and characters. In the same way, BCM’s most successful events like Moonshot and Hertitude were organized to cater to a community that had already been created and cultivated by one of their publications. More publications would allow BCM to develop tailored events that attract different audience segments, bringing fresh ideas and new themes to the events. Burning Ram, BCM’s first attempt at a food festival, was relatively successful, but the impact and reach could have been increased if there was an existing cooking or food publication with a dedicated following.
Events are location-based: Events have an inherent geographical limitation. Unlike digital publications that can reach a global audience instantly, events are bound to a specific location, which restricts their reach. Even with live streaming options, the core experience of many events relies on in-person participation, where attendees network, socialize, and interact with the content or speakers firsthand. For a media company like BCM, whose publications attract diverse audiences from across Nigeria and beyond, focusing heavily on events means they are primarily serving only those who can physically attend.
Disruption in events will affect company revenue: Events have become a key part of BCM’s revenue stream. However, they can be affected by external factors beyond the company’s control. Any disruption, like a pandemic, for instance, will have serious implications for the company.
In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson records a conversation between Steve Jobs and Apple board member Mike Markkula just before Jobs became interim CEO of Apple in 1997:
“Jobs’s ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. ‘Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business,’ Markkula said. ‘You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.’”
Apple has reinvented itself over the years, now BCM is following a similar trajectory to provide value to its audience. In 2014, the primary channel was a tech blog. A decade later, it is a sold out tech conference, among other events.
]]>It’s been a year since I last sent an edition of this newsletter. A year (and two months) since I joined Rest of World as the Africa Editor. I needed time to settle into my role, and I hope you can understand. I’m glad that I can write this newsletter again. So, today, I want to take some time to share a few lessons I’ve learned and trends I’ve noticed in the last year about Africa’s tech media and how it covers the ecosystem.
I also want to share some thoughts about its evolution. I’ve observed events, had conversations with several people, and spent time thinking about all these. I’m eager to know what you think as well.
Let’s dig in.
Rest of World was founded a little over three years ago with a simple premise: to cover stories about the impact of technology outside the Western bubble. For many years, regions like Africa have not received sufficient and proper tech coverage in international media. In some cases, the coverage has been primarily local and siloed—very rarely does anyone sit down to connect the dots between a tech story in Africa and its potential global relevance. In many ways, Rest of World’s coverage of the continent fills that gap.
Indigenous tech publications have, until now, done well to explore the nitty gritty of their ecosystems. However, very few approach this from a global perspective, and it is understandable. The market is still nascent in the grand scheme of things. But our work at Rest of World proves that there’s an opportunity for this type of global coverage.
In the last 12 months, for instance, we have published stories about China’s role in the development of Nigeria’s lithium, AI’s impact on Kenya’s essay-for-hire industry, Nigerian filmmakers skipping Netflix for YouTube, ride-hailing unions struggling for traction in eight African countries, Worldcoin’s chaotic launch in Kenya, Senegalese farmers using WhatsApp voice notes to break language barriers, and Sudanese startups building tech solutions to help citizens get through the war. We also interviewed OpenAI’s Sam Altman during his visit to Lagos, Nigeria.
All this has had a tremendous effect. Our Africa stories are consistently among the most-read stories every month. A significant segment of our audience lives outside the continent, while the other segment is spread across it. These are still early days, but there’s enough to indicate a hunger for focused and globally contextualized African tech coverage.
Two of the most important things I have to do in my role are to connect with already established journalists on the continent and find new talent, allowing them to display their ability to a global audience. So far, so good. But there’s still much more work to do, especially within the tech media.
Each industry has its peculiarities, but there are also several similarities. Tech, like energy, politics, and financial markets, requires journalists to be deeply knowledgeable in addition to their reporting skills. The African tech media industry, as we know it, is still nascent. It’s barely 12 years old, and many of its pioneers have long moved on to other ventures. Those who stay long enough to grow their expertise and skills often pivot into more financially rewarding roles outside of the media. Thus, talent turnover is high. This talent hemorrhage creates gaps that need to be filled better and faster, and it requires constantly finding and training new tech journalists. It also requires the tech media itself to be able to compete for talent with the industry it covers. (I’ve written about this a few times, here and here.)
Here are some ideas to solve this problem:
Training programs and fellowships dedicated to tech journalism in Africa. I admire journalists who cover development, climate change, and other social issues. They don’t lack training resources and investment—whether this is from private enterprises, non-profit foundations, or non-governmental organizations. African tech journalism needs this more than it needs the invites to events and conferences. The MTN Group’s Media Innovation Programme, in partnership with Pan Atlantic University, is a good start. But there has to be more.
Tech journalists also need to mingle and interface more often with colleagues from other more established industries like politics and finance. They need to do better to understand the intricacies of the ecosystem they cover. There’s a level of individual responsibility required here — the journalist has to recognize their shortcomings and make the effort to remedy them. But there should also be a deliberate industry-driven effort to ensure journalists have a deeper understanding of the people and companies they cover.
Two years ago, the most significant criticism of African tech journalism was that it focused too much on startup fundraising stories. A few people went as far as calling the coverage dull and unimaginative. Two years later, the biggest criticism now is that coverage is too negative. Many believe that journalists are hunting for stories that paint founders in a bad light. But any objective observer will tell you that this is simply a sign of the times.
When the conversation about the quality of tech coverage began rising to the surface two years ago, I wrote in this newsletter:
“What we see with the nature of tech’s most prominent stories reflects the industry’s evolution and what people pay the most attention to (whether they admit it or not, data doesn’t lie).”
About a decade or so ago, tech journalism revolved around startup and founder profiles. A few years later (circa 2018), it became about the attention startups got from local and foreign investors. Now that there is a global tech downturn, the stories are reflecting that reality. This evolution is happening publicly, and many people do not know how to handle it. This is the reason for the seeming growing tension between the ecosystem and the publications that cover it.
But what we’re really witnessing is another chapter in a developing story, and it will pass. There are no bigger or deeper lessons to learn here. This is just history playing out and an industry growing up before our eyes.
Africa’s media market is small compared to other developing economies like LatAm and South Asia. I have seen stories in local publications that would have been better reported as part of a collaboration with media in other countries or journalists in other industries. I believe this should be the next stage of African tech media’s evolution.
Local tech publications need to start thinking more deeply about how they can collaborate and on what they can collaborate. Techpoint and TechCabal’s coverage of the 2.9 billion naira ($3.2 million) hack of customer accounts on Flutterwave’s network is a good example. Techpoint broke the story on March 5, 2023, before TechCabal published a follow-up report five days later. I understand the demands of a fast news cycle and how quickly things can become stale, so both publications were right to publish the stories as they did. But in hindsight, I can see how much more impactful a more detailed story, perhaps even a joint investigation, that is the product of combined newsroom efforts and resources could be. I believe this is the difference between stories that section of the internet talks about and stories that the whole country (or continent) pays attention to.
However, for these collaborations to happen, the publications have to see themselves more as partners and less as competitors. Is this possible? Can media organizations look beyond the present and think further into the future? Answering this question is where the bulk of the work is.
Very often, when people talk about the media, what they’re really referring to is journalism. But they aren’t the same thing. The latter is a subset of the former, and I want to focus on that differentiation briefly.
When I think about Africa’s tech media, I think beyond journalistic publications. I think about all the creator-led platforms. I think about podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube channels.
My favorite tech podcast, The Open Africa Podcast, is hosted by three ecosystem operators with no journalistic ties, and they consistently produce great commentary. Andile Masuku’s African Tech Roundup made podcasting cool before most people even knew what it was. Peace Itimi’s documentary about Nigeria’s tech ecosystem is one of the most comprehensive historical overviews of the industry around. Fatu Ogwuche’s Backstories YouTube series has brought more flavor and style to tech interviews than several others have managed to. Justin Norman’s The Flip Africa podcast and newsletter have been as insightful for as long as I’ve known them. Fisayo Fosudo’s YouTube channel has blended tech with lifestyle in a way that no one else has. There’s an army of other examples—people who have no journalistic backgrounds or training but have significant audiences and are all a part of the tech media. They are fundamental building blocks of the industry.
I’ve spent 12 months thinking a lot about the state and future of Africa’s tech media – chief among my concerns is what we can do to improve the quality of our talent, coverage, and conversations, and create better outcomes.
What is lacking, and how can we change that? What does better look like, and how can we achieve it? What resources do we need? Who should we be talking to? Who and what should we be paying attention to?
These questions keep me up at night. Perhaps we need to talk about these things more openly and constructively (which probably eliminates Twitter [or X, meh!] as an option). Or maybe we need a series of symposiums. I’d love to hear your thoughts and read your comments.
]]>Many Kenyans think of the media as a glamorous business. For instance, media personalities in the biggest TV and radio roles are bonafide celebrities with millions of followers on social media. But recent headlines surrounding the country’s largest media companies are taking the shine off the industry, raising further questions about the sustainability of Africa’s media ecosystems.
Journalists going unpaid for three months at Standard Group, Kenya’s second-largest media company, is the latest headline maker. To outside observers, the news was surprising, shocking even. Because despite the decline in legacy media companies’ prospects, no one imagined it was that bad – at least not at a company that generated $11.2 million (Ksh1.4 billion) in revenue between January and June 2022.
The company is paying salaries in instalments while fighting off the Kenya Union of Journalists (KUJ). Standard Group owns The Standard newspaper, Kenya’s second-most circulated paper, as well as the 24-hour news channel KTN News, entertainment channel KTN Home, and several other TV, radio, digital, and print brands, all occupying different niches. Since 2019, a year after it posted a net profit of $2.08 million (Ksh261 million), the company has been in the red.
That same year, when it launched new broadcast properties Spice FM, Vybez Radio, and Burudani TV, Standard posted a $3.8 million (Ksh 484 million) loss. In Covid-ravaged 2020, it recorded a $3.4 million (Ksh434 million) loss. It significantly cut its loss for the year ended 31st December 2021 to $175,957 (Ksh22 million) as the economy bounced back and advertising income rose.
In November 2022, the company warned shareholders that earnings for the year ending December 31st, 2022, were expected to be at least 25 percent lower than reported earnings for the previous year. CEO Orlando Lyomu attributed the expectedly poor performance to the increased cost of raw materials, global supply chain disruptions, and depreciation of the Kenyan shilling. He blamed these factors for a 50% increase in the cost of production, as well as “the heightened political environment with advertisers pulling out during the political campaign period between July and October.”
Standard Group journalists who spoke to us indicated that in their communication to staff, the company blamed declining print circulation and macroeconomic factors, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, for the company’s financial challenges.
“Officially, we were told it’s because print sales are down, and the lingering effects of Covid-19, but there are a lot of rumours and stories going around,” one journalist stated, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In watercooler conversations, staff members also question the company’s recent expansion. Standard’s new capital-intensive ventures, mostly niche radio and TV stations launched within the past four years, are yet to turn profitable.
“As with other media houses, we experienced a decline in print circulation numbers, and achieving profitability from our new products has taken longer than forecast,” the company observed in its 2021 annual report [pdf].
Like other leading Kenyan media houses, Standard’s cash flow challenges have been exacerbated by dues owed to them by the Government Advertising Agency (GAA). Kenya's government owes media houses over $8.7 million (Ksh1.1 billion). The debt is only a tiny fraction of the $4.3 billion (Ksh504 billion) government ministries and agencies owe suppliers. President William Ruto’s administration promised to settle the media debt.
Notably, media companies in Kenya, including Standard Group, have struggled to keep up with shifting media consumption and advertising trends. Robert Ndung’u, publisher of Kenyans.co.ke, one of Kenya’s most visited news websites, said:
“It's a combination of many factors. Generally, the economy has been on a downward trend. Digital is also playing a big role because a majority of people are now consuming their news online, and the numbers keep growing. The other thing is companies also haven’t been able to monetise online platforms as well as they should, so there’s a gap. The business model of digital is not catching up to the speed at which people are using digital. With that, these companies are caught in a situation where they have to lay off people.”
The situation at Standard is particularly dire, but the struggles of traditional media companies aren’t unique to it. Nation Media Group (NMG), the biggest media house in Kenya, began trimming its payroll in November 2022 to remain competitive. It pushed out top editors and famous on-screen personalities, such as primetime news anchor Mark Masai and editor-in-chief Mutuma Mathiu.
Standard Group also began laying off staff earlier this year. Radio Africa Group and Capital Media are among the leading media companies that have announced plans for mass layoffs within the past quarter. Layoffs across the sector have happened regularly over the past few years. A common thread sees these companies tying the layoffs with plans to restructure their operations and accelerate digital transformation.
The challenges facing legacy media companies aren’t unique to Kenya. They are a global problem, Mutana Gakuru, a media entrepreneur, said. In the past year, CNN has laid off hundreds of employees, while the BBC announced plans to lay off 382 staff members as it accelerates its digital shift.
The vast majority of Kenya’s biggest media houses are either owned by politicians or individuals affiliated with politicians. This influences political coverage, as media houses align their content with shareholders’ varying interests. The family of the late former President Daniel Arap Moi, now led by his son and former Senator Gideon Moi, is closely associated with the Standard Group.
Public perception of the media is already complicated enough. Market leaders Nation Media Group, Standard Group, and Royal Media Services (RMS) all attracted the ire of President William Ruto and his supporters over what they perceived as bias against him during the Presidential campaign of 2022. Much like Trump, Ruto himself rallied his supporters against the mainstream media.
During the 2022 General Elections, Moi supported Raila Odinga’s bid for president against Ruto. RMS Chairman SK Macharia did, too, and was a familiar face at Odinga’s rallies. Ruto’s lieutenants also accused top editors at Nation Media Group (NMG) of supporting Odinga.
In response to trending stories on the woes bedevilling media houses, it isn’t uncommon to find a section of Kenyans supporting the downfall of these organisations over their perceived political biases - highlighting just how much work needs to be done by media houses to win public trust.
The sorry state of the Kenyan media gets more worrying when you consider the implications of a struggling, demoralised journalistic workforce. Besides the diminished public access to quality news and information, the industry regulator Media Council of Kenya (MCK) is linking journalism’s financial woes to an uptick in extortion and unethical practices by its practitioners.
“If you open a media house and recruit people, make sure that they earn. Otherwise, they become extortionists. You saw last week we cancelled accreditation cards to deal with this matter,” stated MCK CEO David Omwoyo at a forum with lawmakers while decrying journalists' non-payment at top media houses.
It is clear that to ensure journalists are rewarded for their work and the media serves its purpose and delivers on its responsibility to the public, there needs to be a concerted effort to make media ecosystems in Kenya (and Africa) more sustainable. Media houses need to be better equipped to thrive in this digital age. Innovation and digital transformation should be more than corporate buzzwords but fundamental facets of companies’ operations and strategies. Localising innovation, rather than copy-pasting what works for global publications and audiences, is also vital.
Those in the industry believe it is possible to monetise digital media outlets in Kenya sustainably and that it's only a matter of time.
“The thing about paying for content is about value. Even in the US, when you talk about the New York Times being able to monetise sustainably, it’s because they have invested heavily in their journalism and are giving very valuable content that people want to subscribe to. And also, in the US, many outlets haven’t been able to monetise. So it’s not a country-specific thing. It’s about whichever media can provide valuable content to the audience, and that depends on how fast they can do it, so it can even happen this year (in Kenya) if someone can hack the content,” Ndung’u said.
Martin K.N Siele is a digital storyteller and audience builder. He is a contributor for Quartz Africa and also the content lead at Business Today Kenya. Passionate about African media, sports, and entertainment, Siele also launched Loud.co.ke.
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At the City University of New York, there’s a product immersion programme for journalists interested in using product thinking to serve their audiences better and make their profession more sustainable. Anita, the author of our last newsletter, was selected for the latest cohort.
For the next two months, she will join 24 other journalists to learn about product management and development from facilitators from Stanford University’s design school, Financial Times, NowThis, Vox Media, and Daily Maverick.
Five thousand miles from New York, there’s another programme at the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos, Nigeria. It’s designed to help journalists understand the impact of technology on their work and the economics of their profession. It takes them through modules about the subscription model, emerging technologies, and monetisation strategies.
These programmes are two out of several global initiatives designed to help journalists develop the skills and frameworks required to keep their profession sustainable. All over the world, there’s a realisation that the news business can no longer exist as it is. Journalistic content now swims within a massive pool, and media companies compete with other platforms vying for the same audience’s attention.
This idea formed the basis for “Communiqué 30:Journalism in the creator economy”. We explored why journalists need to realise how much the environment for content has changed and then adapt to this new reality.
Today, we’ll go a step further to examine what precisely this new reality entails. What do forward-thinking media companies do that others don’t? What ideas are they embracing that others need to? Enter product thinking.
Product thinking is simply the idea that you first seek to understand your user’s problem, contextualise that problem, and then design products to solve it. To build a successful product, you must first find real-world problems, not invent them. This is where the hard work of user research comes in.
In the context of journalism, product thinking begins with realising that every way people experience the news is a possible product or feature. In the past, this was more straightforward. If you worked for a print publication, the newspaper or magazine was the product. If you worked for a radio or TV station, the programmes were the product.
Times have changed. The advent of the Internet and the proliferation of digital and social media mean there’s much more dynamism and options in how people interact with the news.
Journalism is as much a business as it is a social good. The need for a product approach to journalism has become more obvious as the business models that support it have been disrupted. Meredith Gallo, writing for the Northwestern University Knight Lab, puts it neatly:
“As traditional media struggled to adopt new approaches to content, the business models that historically paid for journalism began to be disrupted. Classified ads, a lucrative and reliable revenue stream for pre-internet newspapers, migrated to websites such as Realtor.com (homes) and Monster.com (jobs). Search engine ads attracted advertisers who wanted to pay only if ads generated business for them. Social media platforms made it possible for small businesses to target narrow audiences at a fraction of the cost of advertising in newspapers or on TV.”
Beyond balancing editorial commitments and business models, product thinking also forces journalists to look beyond the stories they publish and consider how the audience interacts with, consumes, and considers paying for them.
In the past year, we’ve covered a few examples of media companies in emerging markets applying product thinking elements to their work. We’ve looked at Stears Business, Daily Maverick, The Continent, and Big Cabal Media.
Stears is a fascinating example because it’s set up more like a tech company. It has a product team and encourages its writers to apply product thinking to their work. A recent example is in its approach to building an app. Media platforms have been designing and building their own apps for ages. But what makes Stears relevant to this conversation is its approach to developing the app.
Yvette Uloma Dimiri, the company’s Head of Subscription Growth and former Product Manager, says, “After launching Stears Premium, we were focused on understanding our users’ experience. We looked at the data and saw that engagement wasn’t where we wanted it to be, so we started conducting interviews to better understand the ways we weren’t meeting their needs.
“We found out some interesting things. Our customers were telling us how they were consistently missing our emails, our daily briefings, or how they didn’t want to read across the various sectors we covered. Basically, they wanted a lot more focus, and we were writing too broadly for them. They also needed more help from us with retrieving pieces that they cared about and discovering pieces they should care about.”
This insight, drawn out from user research, prompted the Stears team to develop the app. While this isn’t necessarily new or groundbreaking, it fits into the product thinking model, which more media companies need to apply.
Another example is The New York Times, the media’s poster child for product thinking. For many years, the company was perceived as a fading legacy force, a relic of an era past in danger of usurpation by newer entrants like BuzzFeed. But The New York Times has turned things around and become more powerful than ever.
In 2014, it began applying more digital innovation elements, like product thinking, to its work. It tried a few things: a smartphone app that first failed but is now wildly successful, a cooking app that immediately succeeded, and puzzles, all of which helped boost its subscriber figures.
The New York Times also embraced more experimentation, hiring web developers, multimedia producers, and product specialists. In 2020, it put together a team of editors, product managers, news designers, product designers, engineers and data analysts to create and scale its ‘Live’ product, which “consists of blogs, briefings and chats, providing in-depth coverage for a wide variety of news events”. It now has an internal product design team responsible for building its applications, website, newsletter templates, and other multimedia experiences. Beyond that, the company also documents its product and design thinking processes, making some publicly available.
Several other examples include HumAngle, The National News, Vox, and BuzzFeed.
Journalism as a profession can no longer produce news stories without first understanding the audience and the economics of the business. This doesn’t mean that journalists must enslave themselves to popularity or profit. No. That leads to duplicity and avarice. It means that journalists and the companies they work for must become fully aware of the modern demands of the profession. What was sufficient in the past is no longer sufficient today.
Furthermore, the burden of adaptation can’t fall squarely on the shoulders of individuals. It must be a collective effort. Therefore, the onus is on the companies and not solely the journalists to create an environment that enables product thinking.
So, how do we do that?
The first step to building a culture of product thinking within a newsroom is encouraging journalists to interact with their readers as much as they do with their sources. Doing this will help them better understand content consumption needs and habits. As we’ve already established, product thinking requires understanding real-world problems and developing products or features to solve them. It is impossible to know what those problems are if you don’t talk to people.
This isn’t to say that journalists must become UX researchers. However, it helps if they can borrow from that toolkit.
Product thinking requires a lot of experimentation and documentation. It’s always best to start with small-scale experiments you can easily adjust based on results. It’s also important to document every part of the process. If something fails or succeeds, there must be enough documentation explaining the reasons for either outcome. This provides a body of knowledge that can help improve the results of future experiments.
If, like The New York Times, you choose to make some parts of the process public, that also helps position your company as an industry leader, attracting more prestige and attention to your brand.
Realistically, most media outlets, especially those in emerging markets, can’t afford multiple product managers. Quite frankly, they might not need that many. Often, one product manager is enough. For those who can’t afford product managers with high salary demands (because they’ll most likely land in tech companies), it’s also not a bad idea to hire entry-level PMs. They’ll probably not stay with you for long, but hiring them could be mutually beneficial.
Another option is upskilling a current staff member with the potential for or interest in product management. One of my favourite examples is Jason Von Berg of The National News, a UAE-based publication. Von Berg joined the company as a mobile app editor and then moved to head audience growth. A few years later, he moved into the product manager role, which he’s occupied for the last year and a half. Dimiri of Stears followed a similar path. She joined the company as Growth Editor and later moved into a product management role before her current appointment as Head of Subscriptions Growth.
Product thinking doesn’t guarantee success but always leads to better outcomes, and that makes success more attainable. The forward-thinking media companies know this and are adjusting their operations in response.
There’s a lot more that journalists and news media entrepreneurs can learn about how technology impacts their profession. This is a good place to start. Anyone interested in learning more will find this series of articles by the Northwestern University Knight Lab resourceful. It’s also important to step further out of the media bubble to discuss with product managers and developers in other industries. We’ll all be better for it.
PS: Thank you to Alexandria Sahai Williams for the idea to write this essay and for working with me to develop it.
We’re looking to put together more events for our community. If you’re interested, please, fill out this form to help us understand what you’d like.
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I spend a lot of time thinking about journalism's evolution, particularly how it has changed economically over the years. I left the profession in 2019 but still care deeply about it. I recognise how much we need good journalism, how much we need good journalism to be sustainable, and how much we need journalists to be able to enjoy the financial rewards of their work.
It’s a big problem when journalists can’t make a good living from the work they do. That introduces new layers of complexity that have serious consequences for society. If we can’t trust that journalists will produce great work and be able to sustain themselves on the proceeds of that work, then we’re in trouble.
Many of my thoughts on this topic are products of a conversation with Laura Oliver for her piece for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. It explores the pros and cons of working as a solo journalist in an emerging market. Taking a global view, it examines examples from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It also considers journalism within the creator economy.
Oliver writes:
“Estimates for the market value of the creator economy, an industry consisting of millions of bloggers, videographers, social media influencers and digital content creators, run as high as $104.2 billion… Journalists running and monetising their own output are part of this industry. While the term creator might suggest fabrication rather than rigorous reporting, what journalists share with their fellow creators are the challenges of going it alone: becoming entrepreneurial, delivering your own product and making the business work.”
When we think about journalism, we often don’t consider it a part of the creator economy, which has commercial undertones. Journalism is primarily considered a public service. It’s as much for the good of the masses as it is for-profit, maybe even more.
Journalists also don’t like to think of themselves as content creators, but they are. Every piece of journalism feeds into the global content ecosystem, whether online or offline. Every news story, feature article, analysis, etc., is content. We just consume and interact with them differently.
For many years, journalists have played second (or third) fiddle to the sales and business people who sell ads and subscriptions. The journalists often put their lives on the line to gather sources and break stories but somehow end up with the short end of the revenue stick.
Analysing the US job market in 2014, researcher Alex T. Williams wrote that in comparison to Public Relations, “journalists earned significantly less ($35,600 versus $54,940)” and that the salaries of journalists didn’t keep up with inflation in the ten years preceding his research.
In the UK, research conducted in the early 2010s showed that one in four journalists earned less than £20,000 a year. One journalist, Jim Oldfield, revealed that he earned just £25,500 despite having worked for 37 years.
In 2020, I wrote about the cost of good journalism in Nigeria and highlighted the feeble economics of the business:
“Nigeria is far from being an ideal market. Here, the relationship between advertisers and journalists is skewed in favour of the advertisers, the market for journalism doesn’t seem to have grown much over the past decade or two, Nigeria’s economy is anything but great, and, to a large extent, proximity to political power influences business and economic success.”
There are two ways to answer this question. First, you have people who argue that journalists earn poorly because their content does not offer as much commercial value as others in the same value chain. The thinking is that once a news story breaks, it loses its commercial appeal. Media and tech analyst Ben Thompson puts it this way, “News, the moment it is reported, immediately loses all economic value as it is reproduced and distributed for free, instantly.”
A better way to say this is that journalists who earn poorly do so because their work is highly fungible.
Some others argue that journalists earn poorly because they haven’t paid enough attention to their industry's economic realities and evolution. Once upon a time, journalism was in its golden age, a time when it attracted massive investments, attention, and cash flow. The traditional news media had a near-monopoly on people’s attention, and advertisers recognised that. However, the times have changed, and the power to command attention and influence behaviour is now concentrated in the hands of a new set of actors – Big Tech companies. So, journalism is a smaller pond, and journalists must flow in this new reality.
That journalism used to be or is a certain way is no guarantee that it will always be that way. In today’s world, the reality is that anyone with a platform can call themselves or be called a journalist. This has impacted how people perceive the profession and what success looks like.
In Nigeria, for example, one of the most influential reporters publishes his hardest-hitting piece on Substack. In football, the most impactful reporter is a 29-year-old freelance journalist who breaks most of his stories on Twitter and his podcast. There is an entire conversation about “influencer journalists” and their impact on the future of journalism.
In the past, to make it as a journalist, you needed to attach yourself to an established news organisation. Today, that isn’t necessary.
In the past, it was inconceivable to refer to a journalist as a creator or influencer. Today, not so much. The tools of the trade, the rules of engagement, and the principles of monetisation are the same.
Let's be clear. This doesn’t apply to all forms of journalism and journalists, but it is increasingly becoming obvious. It’s why even in developed markets, you find that journalists create across the entire content ecosystem. A single journalist can be a writer-reporter, podcaster, and video creator. They can do this for the platforms they work for as much as they can do it for themselves.
In the past, journalists had to depend on corporations for employment and career opportunities. Today, they can set out on their own. This comes with its own challenges, such as support structure and editorial assistance, but these are bugs that technology can fix.
In the past, journalists had little to no equity, taking most of the risk and getting very little in return. Today, technology has so advanced and become ubiquitous that content is increasingly becoming the primary differentiator for any platform. This implies that the platforms that can attract the best and most influential journalists have the upper hand. Now, more than ever, journalists can command the economic value they deserve. But they first need to realise this. Then they need to understand the factors that make it possible.
The journalists who stand out are both aware of their editorial commitments and the economic dynamism of their industry. They know how to report and analyse stories just as well as they understand the commercial demands of the business.
They know that institutional journalism is no longer what it used to be and that the evolution of digital technology and social media has introduced new layers of complexity. They know that a solo sports journalist with a highly-engaging Twitter account, massive Twitch streaming numbers, and a cult following of transfer news-hungry football fans can be just as impactful (if not more) than whatever Sky Sports is with just a fraction of the cost.
For journalism to thrive, we need more journalists who are actively thinking like business people while doing their jobs and more who deeply understand how technology has impacted and will continue to impact their industry.
Journalism — like the creator economy — is a business, every business involves transactions, and transactions require value exchange. The same way society asks creators what their content is worth, it now asks journalists the same. What's your reply?
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In March 2022, Big Cabal Media (BCM) announced it had raised $2.3 million in seed funding, joining a list of African digital media companies that have publicly raised venture capital, including Stears and OMG Digital.
BCM plans to grow its audience, expand its creative studio’s capacity, and develop new products with the investment. It currently owns two publications, TechCabal, which covers African tech, and Zikoko, a lifestyle publication that explores African youth culture. According to the company, these publications reach over 30 million people monthly.
BCM’s roster of investors includes Luminate, Unicorn Capital Partners, Future Africa, Mac Venture Capital, and a few angel investors.
The relationship between digital media and venture capital is uneasy, and that is the backdrop for this essay. Only a handful of digital media companies have raised venture capital and produced healthy returns.
The 2010s was a golden era for digital media companies looking to grow fast and upend the reign of their traditional counterparts. Investors were willing to bite on the premise that some of these startups could grow big enough to swallow up the old guard or at least compete significantly.
Buzzfeed, the epitome of that era, raised $696.3 million over ten rounds. Its trajectory was inspirational and meant to usher in a new order. Its CEO, Jonah Perretti, was (and still is) seen as a visionary whose musings on digital media were meant to define the future. But Buzzfeed’s run has been anticlimactic, typified by its disappointing IPO, which opened at $10.95 and has swung between half and one-third of that price since.
Vice, another promising venture, raised over $1.6 billion but has also been uninspiring. In Africa, Ghana’s OMG Digital raised over $1 million in 2017, but it has since shrivelled while all its founders have moved on to other projects. Quartz, another once-hot new media company, has struggled to find an identity. Last month, it sold for less than $10 million to its fourth owner in ten years.
It’s difficult to say The Athletic has been a failure after raising $139.5 million and selling to the New York Times for $550 million. But it also didn’t produce the outstanding returns its investors hoped for. Politico is one rare overwhelming success story, selling to Axel Springer for over $1 billion last year. There are a few other success stories, but the failures and struggles overshadow them.
Rafat Ali, CEO of Skift, a travel industry media company, has consistently argued against relying on venture capital for growth. He preaches that media companies need to stay small and focus on depth rather than breadth. This logic works in some cases, but not for companies with a different kind of ambition and with varying business objectives.
It is difficult (not impossible) to build large-scale, high-impact new media operations without significant capital injection beyond bootstrapping. And for many media founders, venture capital is the lowest hanging fruit.
In the African tech media ecosystem, publishers have lost some of their best talents to the industry they cover. For example, a person spends a few years as a journalist or staff writer with a publication, but they eventually outgrow it and emigrate to the industry itself. They’re likely going to make more money and work on more exciting projects than if they’d stayed with the publication. This isn’t always the case, but it has happened too often, making it a worrying trend for media entrepreneurs.
I wrote about this in a previous essay. There’s some competition between the media and the tech ecosystem for talent, content, and audience attention, but market realities and investor interest favour the latter over the former. So, to compete, media companies have to start thinking in part like the ecosystem they cover. This requires product-led thinking, developing diverse revenue models, and contending for a portion of the venture capital pie.
BCM, in particular, has lost many of its editorial talents to companies within and outside the tech ecosystem. To turn that tide, it needs to grow rapidly, generate more revenue, and, at the very least, compete more vigorously for talent. Raising venture capital enables it to get there faster.
However, as we’ve seen throughout history, when a new media publisher raises venture capital, it can no longer operate strictly as a publisher, especially in Africa, where the market realities are much more brutal. The expectations are different. Ideally, at least.
The major implication of this fundraising is that BCM will need to generate far more returns than the regular media business models will bring.
In his book ‘Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It’, Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreesen Horowitz, provides a simple framework for whether a company should raise venture capital.
He writes:
“...As a rule of thumb, you should be able to credibly convince yourself (and your potential VC partners) that the market opportunity for your business is sufficiently large to be able to generate a profitable, high-growth, several-hundred-million-dollar-revenue business over a seven-to-ten-year period.”
So, venture capital isn’t just another funding model for sustaining a business. It works with the underlying assumption that the business can generate returns in the multiples (7-10x), hence the high level of risk involved (the business owner typically isn’t liable if the business fails).
BCM isn’t oblivious to the fact that VCs fundamentally expect outsized returns, as is evident in its revenue projections for the next few years. It generated over $1 million in revenue last year, growing more than 400% from the previous year. It anticipates a 600% revenue increase over the next two years. Some of this will come from advertising, but that won’t be enough.
Let’s look at Stears, for example. In 2020, when it raised $600,000, the motive was clearly to build beyond publishing. In addition to Stears Business, its subscription-driven publishing arm, it also has a financial data business and announced plans to build a subscription management service last year.
Stears will look to raise additional venture capital, but not with a typical media business strategy. This, eventually, will be the case for BCM.
As BCM looks to broaden and deepen its revenue mix, what areas will it need to focus on?
The same way The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Complex have leveraged their unique content style and identity to build studios and creative agencies that serve clients, BCM is doing the same with its Cabal Creative arm.
While the studio has done some work for corporate clients like MainOne, Coca-Cola, and Nestle in the past, the bulk of its success will rest on Zikoko’s cultural impact. That will set the studio apart from the thousands (and maybe millions) of alternatives.
Let’s take a cue from Pulse, one of the most successful African digital media companies. Pulse has enjoyed some success creating videos for corporate clients. However, many of these videos are essentially replicas of successful formats that Pulse has experimented with over time. Its vox pops, celebrity interviews, and trivia videos found resounding success with the audience. Then the company packed these ideas and sold them successfully to its clients.
In the future, if BCM creates more publications with the uniqueness and stickiness of Zikoko, there will be more opportunities for its creative studio to thrive.
Much like TNC Africa, BCM, through Zikoko, has built up a significant IP library over the past few years, enough to build entire content ecosystems around.
Suppose it can repurpose some of its Naira Life, Sex Life, or Abroad Life hits into successful multimedia projects. In that case, it can head into conversations with streaming platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and Prime that are hunting for high-quality, high-impact African content.
If BCM can pull this off, it will add a few million dollars to its revenue mix.
There aren’t many truly pan-African new media companies around, but BCM is well-positioned to be one. Its tech publication, TechCabal, has the potential to be just that, but there are some adjustments it needs to make first, especially with its recruitment strategy.
TechCabal has tried multiple times to get its East Africa coverage going, hiring a few correspondents over the years, but this hasn’t worked out for various reasons. To mitigate this, it can explore building a network of paid contributors and freelance reporters across the continent. This way, there’s minimal overhead cost but true pan-African coverage.
Zikoko also has the potential to go pan-African, for instance, through spin-offs. It can retain its core strategy and principle but with an approach unique to each market, starting from Ghana and heading into Kenya, South Africa, and parts of Francophone Africa.
As we’ve established, venture capital comes with much more pressure for media companies, which requires thinking beyond regular, prominent revenue streams.
There’s a lot that BCM is already doing — expanding its advertising and sponsored content offerings, deepening its research and digital economy consultancy services, and ramping up the quantity and quality of its content output. However, I think investing in these three areas will be how the company builds its moat and paves the way for the kinds of returns that venture capital demands.
As with all things, though, only time will tell.
Thank you to everyone who applied to be a part of the Communique Learning Circle. We’ve taken in and announced our first cohort. We’ll work with them for the next three months to develop their knowledge and skills. Looking forward to all the great things we’ll do together!
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On March 19, 2022, Multichoice announced the nominees for the 8th Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards. It’s one of the best-executed and most prestigious award shows on the continent. Two entries for the ‘Best Television Series (Drama/Comedy)’ stood out to me -- “My Name is A-Zed” and “Little Black Book”. The latter also bagged a nomination for ‘Best Writer in a Movie or TV Series’.
What do the two shows have in common?
They’re both products of TNC Africa, a TV and film production company founded in 2020 but with a history that stretches back into the previous decade.
To understand TNC Africa’s story, you’d have to go back to 2010 when there was The Naked Convos (TNC), a digital publishing platform launched by Olawale Adetula.
When nearly no one else could dare it, TNC gave young Nigerians a soapbox to express themselves freely and discuss topics they usually wouldn’t talk about without the fear of judgment. (Hence its moniker.)
People could talk about sex and sexuality, abortion, mental health, religion or its absence, and a thousand other topics that society considered taboo or uncomfortable. Hot button issues, if you will.
TNC was Twitter before Twitter became what it is today and Zikoko long before Zikoko existed. In its own way, it predated the Internet culture we’re now growing into.
Powered by staff writers and contributors, anonymous and known, it presented an opportunity for young Nigerians to share experiences that were, on the one hand, unique to them and, on the other hand, relatable to a thousand others. People could tell stories about their lives and find strangers who connected in peculiar ways. (Sound familiar?)
However, as social media platforms like Twitter became more eminent, things were changing for TNC, and it needed to adapt. The new zeitgeist meant people could more openly discuss things that were erstwhile reserved for private conversations or platforms like the one Adetula founded.
“We knew something had to change, or we would become redundant. So, we started experimenting with new things. We wrote and produced a stage play based on stories we had on the website. We published two books -- ‘These Words Expose Us’ and ‘Lights Out: Resurrection’, and we started podcasting (when the medium was in its early stages),” Adetula says.
As the audience and the media they interacted with were changing, TNC had to change with them, out of necessity.
Years of publishing stories and original content on its website meant access to a vast library of ideas and a network of creatives. As part of its evolution, it began helping writers and contributors monetise their content. They often got paid a share of advertising revenue based on the level of engagement their content received.
In 2017, as more platforms and audiences began prioritising video, TNC saw an opportunity to explore a new direction. It partnered with RED TV to produce “Our Best Friend’s Wedding”, a romantic comedy-drama on YouTube.
According to Adetula, both companies teamed up because TNC realised it didn’t yet have the expertise and technical know-how to pull off the quality of production required, even though it had the IP.
The show was a hit, attracting millions of views in its first season, generating millions of impressions through social media conversations, and creating a launchpad for more Nollywood talent.
Its success was an eye-opener and pointed the company toward what was possible, particularly with serial content on YouTube. But to get to this new level, the TNC website had to step back. In fact, it had to fade into the background for something new to emerge.
In March 2020, Adetula announced that The Naked Convos was pivoting “from digital publishing to content production with [a] focus on audio and video web series”. While the website still exists, a new entity was created to drive in this new direction.
This new entity -- TNC Africa, co-founded by Adetula, Gbemi Olateru-Olagbegi, and Daniel Aideyan -- describes itself as “a film and TV company committed to telling original African stories”. But what does that mean?
Adetula explains it this way, in the context of a global audience:
“Everything we know about Africa and Africans right now is being told by the Western media. Even when young creatives get the opportunity to tell African stories on some of these Western platforms, there’s often a filter. The stories hardly ever get told as they really are. TNC Africa wants to bridge that gap by telling stories that Africans can relate with and that go deep into our day-to-day lives.”
Following the success of “Our Best Friend’s Wedding”, TNC Africa created a fiction podcast based on a series of short stories Adetula had written nine years earlier. Some months later, the fiction podcast morphed into a video web series that would eventually score an AMVCA nomination. The series, My Name is A-Zed, became a springboard for TNC Africa to make bolder moves.
Months later, it launched another web series, Little Black Book, which also received two AMVCA nominations.
Instead of putting its content behind a paywall, TNC Africa delivers it to its audience for free via a YouTube channel. The idea is for more people to have access to the content, which is then monetised through ads and brand partnerships with Uber, Sterling, Malta Guinness, etc.
Beyond access to a wider audience with less friction, publishing its content on YouTube gives TNC Africa the chance to integrate analytics more seamlessly into its strategy. Where other production companies would need to rely on third-party data measurement, TNC Africa simply needs to look into its backend and make decisions from there.
However, the long-term strategy is that the popularity of its content will give it leverage in conversations with streamers and distributors like Amazon Prime and Showmax, both of which already host some of TNC Africa’s content, and possibly Netflix. Adetula says the company is in conversation with several other platforms.
While there are feature-length productions in its future, TNC African currently focuses on serial programming. “We focus a lot on [serial] content right now because many of the stories we want to tell require multiple episodes and longer running time,” Adetula explains. He also believes there’s a gap for serial content since several other production companies like Inkblot Productions, Golden Effects, and Anthill Studios that have relationships with streaming platforms focus mainly on feature films.
Two things stand out to me about TNC Africa’s story. The first is the willingness to acknowledge when the tides shifted and adjust accordingly, the awareness to know when its audience was moving on and to figure out what to do next. The second is the commitment to reinventing itself and building technical capacity.
We often criticise Mark Zuckerberg for constantly copying features from emerging platforms perceived as threats to Facebook’s dominance. He did it with Snapchat and with Tik Tok. There are several other examples. But the core of his logic is the speed at which innovation happens and the snappiness with which audiences evolve. Yesterday, Facebook was cool. Today, it’s for old people. Yesterday, Twitter was The Flash, but there’s a younger generation of people who think it’s too slow.
Innovation happens and audience behaviour changes, and sometimes, we can do nothing about them. But sometimes, we can. Sometimes, we can adjust. We can tear things down and rebuild them. We can make little changes, or we can make massive ones. We can throw out the old for the new to come. It’s in those instances that history defines us.
So, I find TNC Africa’s reinvention fascinating for the same reason I can understand Facebook/Meta’s paranoia -- technology and audience behaviour are changing faster than ever. You can either strap and change your direction or stay still and fade into oblivion. TNC Africa saw what was and what could be, and chose the former. That, in my opinion, is a story worth telling.
This month, we’re hosting our first offline event in Lagos, Nigeria in partnership with the Creative Economy Practice at CcHub. It’s an event for creators, investors, and business people interested in Africa’s creator economy. We’ll share more details in the coming days. Please follow the CMQ Media account on Twitter to stay updated!
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One of the biggest questions journalism struggles to answer today is how it’ll sustain itself. The era when journalists and publishers didn’t have to think too deeply about business models, when they could just do good work, write their stories, publish them, and subsidise operations with advertising revenue is ebbing away.
For many decades, newspapers, magazines, radio, and television were the most prominent mediums of mass communication. They dominated the share of advertising spend. If companies wanted to connect with customers, they would often do so via these mediums.
Then the Internet and smartphone entered the equation, handing over power to a new set of players. Suddenly, the once-dominant players were no longer so. Power was taken away from one empire and given to another.
In addition, advertising technology became more accessible, and any major company with a suitable customer base and reach could build out its own advertising business.
As the Internet, smartphones, and advertising technology improved, so did the allure of these new platforms. Companies could reach millions of customers on Facebook, Google, and other dirt cheap digital channels. Measuring the reach and impact of their advertising became more affordable too. Consequently, companies could spread their ad spend across more channels, with less of it going to the media companies that produced journalism.
Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) are now the two biggest advertising companies globally, and neither one existed 25 years ago.
In 2021, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, banked $257.6 billion in advertising revenue, up 41% from 2020. Meta generated $114.93 billion, and Amazon, which we typically don’t associate with advertising, banked $31 billion. Even Walmart made $2.1 billion.
The point is that the competition for advertising dollars is at an all-time high, and journalism is one of the industries hardest hit by this development.
One region where this is having the most significant impact is Africa. Journalism has never really been the most lucrative business on the continent, even in its biggest economies like Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa. But beyond its economic frailty, political dynamics are also at play. Across the continent, business success is largely influenced by proximity to political power. Robust journalism can’t thrive in such an environment.
There have been a few attempts to remedy this problem, including donor-backed journalism and subscriptions. But neither has proven to be a magic bullet, not that anyone thinks they can be.
Now and then, a business model springs up that provides a little ray of light on a gloomy horizon. In the case of today’s newsletter, it’s membership. More specifically, we’ll look at Daily Maverick’s membership model.
I wrote about this briefly last year:
“South African publication, Daily Maverick, understands this dynamic well. In late 2018, it launched a 200 Rand-per-month ($14.73) membership model, which now has over 8,000 members. Its content remains free-to-read, but the membership option takes things up a notch. It eliminates ads and gives access to discounted event tickets, members-only webinars with Daily Maverick journalists and editors, the ability to comment on articles, and exclusive newsletters. It also offers members Uber Eats and Uber ride vouchers.
While this may not be ideal, it still shows what is possible when the media is willing to move beyond advertising dependency and think more creatively about making money.”
In December 2008, with the world feeling the pain of a global financial crisis, Branko Brkic’s magazine, Maverick, went under. For those three years, it provided South Africans with hard-hitting journalism, much like Dele Olojede’s NEXT did in Nigeria. By 2009, Brkic had redesigned a new publication to mirror what he’d done before, but this time fully digital. The product? Daily Maverick.
For ten years, Daily Maverick struggled to find the right revenue model. First, the South African market is, in Brkic’s words, “already small to start with”. And while advertising is the perfect fit for many other media and content types, it’s usually at loggerheads with platforms providing the kind of journalism Daily Maverick does.
Putting stories behind a paywall was out of the question, mainly because it’s a disservice to the people who can’t afford to pay for access for one reason or the other. As a solution, Daily Maverick launched a membership programme that offers readers the opportunity to support the publication for a fee and get access to some benefits in return.
Those benefits include access to the Daily Maverick’s journalists, bi-weekly behind-the-scenes newsletters, ad-free reading experience, ability to share feedback and comment on articles, early bird registration and discounted tickets to events, always-on 10% discount at the Daily Maverick shop, and monthly Uber vouchers.
Daily Maverick now has over 13,000 members who pay at least $4.50 per month.
As I wrote in the previous essay, while the Daily Maverick’s design of its membership program may not be the most compelling, it offers a glimpse of what is possible when we dig deeper.
I find the membership model interesting because it’s the one that’s most symmetrical with my perspective on how journalism can become sustainable on the continent. I don’t think subscriptions are scalable (we have a few success stories but no more). Plus, they’re exclusionary and threaten to cut out a low-income majority who can’t afford to pay multiple times for content.
I don’t believe donations or donor-based businesses are sustainable either. The economic dynamics are far too arbitrary.
And obviously, it’s tricky for journalism to rely solely on advertising (even though it will remain the lifeblood of media for many more years). But membership? I think it’s worth doubling down on.
Styli Charalambous, Daily Maverick’s publisher and CEO, writes about this:
“Membership implies an exchange of value beyond a transactional gateway to content, and in our opinion is the hardest of the three models [including donations and subscriptions] to get right but carries with it the potential to be the most rewarding.”
The keyword there is “potential”. There are no guarantees of success. In “The subscription playbook”, I argue that in this market, providing content worth paying for is not enough. There has to be more. This is particularly true for journalism, mainly because the market has been habituated to consume heavily subsidised or free content. This behaviour is even more conspicuous when the content is from online sources.
The membership model can solve this problem if done right and scaled properly.
I base my argument for the membership model on two things. The first is that, given the economic realities of the media business in Africa, most people would rather not pay directly for content. However, they’re more comfortable doing so indirectly. There are, of course, some exceptions (Multichoice being the chief), but this is largely true across the continent.
Purchasing data subscriptions and buying the smartphone or equipment needed to consume the content already take up a huge chunk of income. A subset of consumers is willing to pay directly for the content they consume. But subsets are limited by definition. Nevertheless, even with this economic reality, it makes no sense to be defeatist and conclude that creating content that can pay for itself is not a worthwhile endeavour.
The other point is that, from time immemorial, people have paid for access to benefits that improve their lives. These benefits range from base things like food, transportation, leisure, and entertainment, to more sophisticated things like social capital, career advancement, and improved financial odds. Offer a person the chance to climb up the social ladder, get ahead in their career, or make more money, and see what they’d be willing to give up in exchange.
The membership model has the potential to combine these two facts of human behaviour and build a business upon them. After all, country clubs and trade associations have proven over many decades that this is possible. Why can’t journalism at least try?
PS: Thank you to Andile Masuku and Modupe Oloruntoba for providing additional resources and insight for this essay!
]]>What do we mean when we say creators must learn to meet people where they are? What does this look like in practice?
I spent a portion of “Communique 10: Can podcasts scale in Africa?” examining the question. I argued that one reason (among many) podcasts haven’t yet scaled on the continent is the gap in how we think about distribution.
“If people already spend most of their screen time on social media and instant messaging, then podcasters need to do a better job of meeting people where they are instead of just creating for their podcast platforms,” I wrote.
The summary of that essay is that it is much better to understand how people already behave and adapt whatever we’re doing to their behaviour. My search for creators adopting this strategy led me to The Continent, a South African-based weekly newspaper distributed digitally via instant messaging platforms.
I first read about the publication’s strategy on Nieman Lab, but I’d come across a few editions on Aanu Adeoye’s WhatsApp status. The Continent distributes editions of its newspaper in PDF primarily through WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. But it also provides the options of receiving them via email or downloading from a website.
Simon Allison, the Editor-in-Chief, explains the thinking behind this strategy:
“WhatsApp is the biggest social media platform in Africa. And anecdotally, from our own experiences, it is clear that a lot of people get their news from WhatsApp. The trouble is that, for the most part, media houses have no active presence on the platform. This seemed like a huge missed opportunity.”
Simple as this insight is, it represents a proper understanding of how people get on the Internet across Africa. In most cases, mobile phone apps are the first access point – default browsers, social media, and instant messaging apps. Data from Global Web Index’s 2020 Social Media User Trends Report shows that three African countries top the list of WhatsApp percentage users. That means within these countries, the overwhelming majority of people online are also active WhatsApp users.
In Kenya, for example, 97% of Internet users (from the ages of 16-64) use WhatsApp. In South Africa, it’s 96%, and in Nigeria, it’s 95%. In Zimbabwe, the platform accounts for nearly 44% of mobile Internet usage, and mobile Internet takes up 98% of all Internet usage. Across many African countries, WhatsApp also happens to be where most people spent their screen time. The Continent’s strategy shows that it understands the potential implications of this insight for publishing and distribution.
The publication has grown to roughly 16,000 subscribers with a weekly circulation of about 110,000, something Allison calls “a conservative estimate” and growth that he ascribes to the subscribers’ willingness to share the content with their networks. He argues that if disseminators of fake news and disinformation have proven just how effective WhatsApp can be, why can’t purveyors of credible journalism use it to the same effect?
Since its absorption into the Facebook, sorry, Meta family of apps, WhatsApp has been increasingly engineered to encourage sharing and engagement. However, as the platform grew, so did the likelihood that people would use it to distribute just about anything, including disinformation and unverified content.
To curb this, WhatsApp (or Facebook/Meta) has put in place a few features, one of which is a limitation to the number of times you can forward a piece of content and the number of people you can forward it to at once. This helps reduce the likelihood of spreading harmful content, but it also hampers the reach that credible content can get. This, Allison confirms, is one of The Continent’s biggest challenges with distributing on WhatsApp.
However, based on insight from Kiri Rupiah, The Continent’s distribution manager, the publication found a work-around. It outsources the bulk of its dissemination to “a small number of really engaged subscribers” – super sharers – who go on to spread it within their network.
Beyond the mechanics of distribution on WhatsApp, there’s also the psychology. People are more likely to accept information from those within their intimate circle, which is the type of connection that WhatsApp encourages. In theory, at least. The people closest to you, whom you trust the most, are very likely a WhatsApp text or call away. This, Allison believes, is what makes WhatsApp fundamentally different from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
He explains it this way:
“When you receive a piece of information that is sent directly to you on WhatsApp by a friend, a family member, a colleague – someone you know – you are more likely to give it attention than something that is mass broadcast to the world on Facebook or Instagram. That personal connection between readers is a key part of building trust in the publication. One reader told us that she sends The Continent to her father every week. One day she said to him – you like this newspaper, why don't you subscribe yourself? He replied that he did like getting the newspaper every week, but what he liked even more was getting it from his daughter.”
Another hurdle that comes with distributing via WhatsApp is that there is no direct way to track audience engagement. How then does The Continent acquire and process user feedback?
WhatsApp doesn’t provide any metrics beyond how many people you’ve shared something with. I experience this with Communiqué all the time. Allison says The Continent has “done extensive reader surveys to track how our subscribers share the publication, which is how we can calculate an estimated circulation.” It also engages subscribers via Google Forms (which is how it's able to determine its audience size in the first place). Many of these subscribers provide feedback via The Continent’s WhatsApp line. “People tell us what they like about each issue, they give us feedback, they even use us as an informal fact-checking service,” he says.
Speaking to Nieman Lab, the publication’s editorial director, Sipho Kings, talked about “super sharers” – those who have connected deepest with The Continent and are most likely to share it with their networks. I asked Allison about any plans to create a community reward system, considering how this will likely incentivise more super sharers and create a path to financial sustainability. He confirmed that the publication was not immediately thinking about a reward system but is instead focusing on making these types of subscribers part of the newsroom and allowing them to have some input into decision making.
For example, in its 57th edition published on August 28, 2021, using a Google Form, it asked readers if it should accept an advertising deal from a major bank. 82% of the 445 respondents said it could, on the condition that the deal doesn’t affect editorial independence.
If there are no plans to create community reward systems and the publication has to ask readers before accepting an advertising deal, what is the financial path forward? Also, given the dynamism of the digital media landscape, how is The Continent approaching the gradual shift towards direct audience monetisation?
The publication continues to be careful about using advertising as its primary revenue source. Advertising, as a primary revenue source, lured the news industry into a comfortable place where publishers didn’t have to think creatively about monetisation. That worked in the era where information sources were limited. It’s no longer working in this era of the abundance of screens and implied attention scarcity. Therefore, publications like The Continent would like to avoid walking that path of commoditisation. Currently, it's mainly donor-funded and backed by Mail & Guardian.
Allison says that the nature of the publication’s distribution model means “that we can never put The Continent behind a paywall”. However, he thinks that there is an opportunity to create a community of readers that contribute financially to it. In return, they get input into major decisions about how the publication operates. No newsroom can rely on one funding source, so Allison says these community monetisation plans will be “complemented by continuing to attract donor funding and expanding commercial revenue generation.”
Still, advertising is not taboo. The Continent will continue to explore opportunities for that, but Allison emphasises that the team is determined not to make the mistake of cheapening its advertising space.
“We have said no to a number of ads that did not bring in enough revenue (we are fortunate, thanks to donor funding, that we are in a position to do so). Even though it is distributed digitally, The Continent is a newspaper, and we will charge print advertising rates rather than online advertising rates. We are also determined to carry a small number of high-value ads rather than many low-value ads so that we don’t compromise the reading experience. Slowly advertisers are listening, and we have a couple of deals in the pipeline,” he says.
We’ve decided to switch up the schedule again. (I say “we” because Communique has grown into a team now.) You’ll keep getting one original essay at the start of every month. But instead of weekly follow-ups, you’ll get one other short essay in the middle of the month. This way, we preserve what we have while also trying our best to provide quality responses to your follow-up questions.
Thank you for being such a great community!
]]>In the beginning – before Naira Life, Man Like, Sex Life, and all its famous content series – there was Zikoko the Buzzfeed clone, fueled by listicles and humour soaked in nostalgia and relatability.
Reading an early-day Zikoko listicle was like looking at your life’s story play out in a screen before you. Only, this story was meant to make you laugh.
In 2015, when I worked at Big Cabal Media, Zikoko’s parent company, I witnessed firsthand the gruelling foundational days of building the cultural powerhouse that Zikoko is today. I watched the then-Editor-in-Chief, Damilola Odufuwa, and her editorial team bat ideas for hours and churn out articles and listicles that people read, laughed at, shared on their social media, and moved on from within minutes to find the next interesting thing (as is typical of the modern-day audience).
What follows is the story of Zikoko, its evolution, its relationship with youth culture in Nigeria, and how it thinks about monetising that culture.
Zikoko was founded in 2015 under the Big Cabal Media umbrella. It is the sister publication to one of Africa’s most prominent tech publications, TechCabal.
In its early days, Zikoko was patterned after Buzzfeed, which is to say that it churned out listicles and quizzes designed to be funny, engaging, and shareable. The humour was relatable and, unlike Buzzfeed’s, local.
It took shared Nigerian experiences and found creative ways to make fun of them. This is what endeared readers to the publication. People felt seen. They realised they were not alone. They saw how many other people experienced the same things they did growing up. And this fostered a sense of community in a way that no one had witnessed before.
Before most people understood the formula for virality, Zikoko had hacked it. Almost immediately after its birth, the publication became so popular that it inspired a short-lived rival, Party Jollof. But humour as a digital media strategy can only work for so long (ask Buzzfeed).
The demand to constantly create content that makes people laugh is excruciating. It takes a heavy toll on the editorial team as there’s pressure for everything to be funny, even if the author is not naturally funny.
Asking people to be consistently funny for five days a week and 52 weeks a year will definitely burn them out. Even comedians cannot keep up. Daniel Orubo (one of Zikoko’s earliest employees and a former Editor-in-Chief) talks about the resultant burnout in this interview (emphasis mine):
“After a year of doing listicles and quizzes, I kind of got bored. My editor-in-chief at the time wanted us to expand and do more long-form articles, and I agreed, but I guess what we were doing at the time was working, and people didn't want to switch it up too much. I was like, fair enough, but I don't think I can do this. I don't think I can sit down every single day and be funny on command. So I decided to leave [in 2016] for a French company that had moved to Nigeria.”
Big Cabal Media also went through a rough patch in 2017 that saw poor management decisions and infighting lead to a loss of momentum and identity crisis. During this period, the company’s co-founders split. In 2018, the board brought in Tomiwa Aladekomo, the former MD of Ventra Media Group. Aladekomo had helped to digitally transform one of Nigeria’s legacy publishers, Guardian Nigeria. Now, his task was to steady the Big Cabal Media ship and set course for new territories.
Aladekomo’s arrival came with a new management team and a series of editorial changes. Fu’ad Lawal joined the company from Ringier Africa and soon became Zikoko’s Editor-in-Chief, which he has since moved on from. The publication also gradually shifted from focusing primarily on humour and listicles to telling more culturally impactful stories.
“When I joined Zikoko, the [content] was relatable. It was mostly humour and funny content. But frankly, I don't feel funny. At the time, I knew that I wanted Zikoko to explore beyond the short-form format and listicles. I wanted more. I wanted people to see themselves in the stories. I wanted stories that had more depth. In hindsight, it feels like strategy, but it was mostly slapping things on the wall until something stuck,” Lawal tells me.
Over the years, Zikoko went from subsisting on stories like ‘16 Signs You Are Just Like Your Nigerian Mother’ to stories like ‘5 Nigerian Widows Talk Life After Their Husbands’ Deaths’. Both are listicles, quite alright, and they both require varying levels of work. But they also typify the publication’s evolution. Humour remains elemental to Zikoko’s existence, but it is no longer the fence that encloses its identity.
“One of the things that we decided on during Zikoko's design sprint and personality exploration is that it is limitless. And so, we don't see any limits to the forms in which we explore [stories],” Aladekomo says.
He adds:
“Zikoko today is committed to telling the stories that matter, to capturing all the things that are important to young people, telling stories about them and examining them in a range of different formats. That's everything from written articles to listicles, to newsletters, podcasts (which are coming), and video content. We want to be sitting at the heart of the most important conversations that young people across Nigeria are having. We want to be influencing those conversations. We want to be their voice and reflection. And we want to be shaping the culture.”
Integral to Zikoko’s new identity is that its content is now built around interests (which are then curated into ‘Stacks’). Think about it like this: Zikoko used to be known for listicles and memes (formats), now it is known for its series of stories covering topics that interest the average Nigerian youth: sex, relationships, money, emigration, feminism, masculinity, etc. Exploring the Stacks is almost akin to rummaging through Netflix’s content library.
In theory, each interest (or Stack) can be presented in multiple formats: long-form articles, listicles, videos, newsletters, podcasts, native social media formats, etc.
Beyond the format variety, each of these Stacks can one day be spun off into a standalone publication, developed into a community, packaged into a paid event, or maybe even reformatted into a video series. Naira Life can become Zikoko Money. Sex Life can become Zikoko Sex. Man Like can become Zikoko Men. Zikoko Her can become, well, Zikoko Her. All of these can become TV shows. The stacks present an opportunity for Zikoko to go as deep into any topic of interest as it wants and be as creative with its presentation as money and time allow, as long as it is important to young Nigerians.
Aladekomo says that part of Zikoko’s raison d'être is to touch the cultural nerve and speak about the things that are important to young people. “That can be their careers or money, but it can even be as simple as whether egusi soup is better than oha soup.”
One of the ways Zikoko builds its audience is by factoring habit-formation into its products. For example, each major Stack has a newsletter, and each newsletter runs on a strict schedule. Naira Life, for instance, arrives at 9 am every Monday, such that everyone subscribed knows to expect it at that time. The logic behind this is that schedules ensure consistency and create expectations around the content.
Building this engine of consistency and deliberation requires tremendous investments in talent training and development. It requires the editorial staff not just to be good with words but to deeply understand the content ecosystem they operate in. (It’s why Zikoko writers often go on to occupy prominent roles in the content industry.) But it also requires significant financial resources. It’s often difficult to retain this quality of talent once they reach a particular industry threshold, as I explain in this essay. (Don’t be surprised if Big Cabal Media raises capital in the near future.)
Saturday, August 28, 2021, answered a question I’d been pondering for some years: how will Zikoko expand its monetisation potential?
In hindsight, the answer is obvious, but when you’re there in the beginning, in the publication’s early days, the answers are not exactly clear. Even when you are in the middle of the madness (as some of the people I talked to for this essay are or have been), the answers are difficult to come by. Ideas are great, but execution is the devil.
That day, I sat on the barstool, trying to savour the moment but mostly looking around at the hundreds of young people who had gathered for Zikoko Fest 2021 in Victoria Island, Lagos. Some were dancing, some were buried in conversations, some were lost in their food, some were taking pictures, some others were playing games, and some were purchasing Zikoko merch.
I thought about this: if 300 people had gathered at that venue to enjoy themselves, paying N5,000 (~$9) each to get in and possibly spending more on food and drinks, what would it be like when this movement grows bigger and events like this become more frequent?
Zikoko made money through native advertising (branded listicles and quizzes) in its early days, but the potential to diversify was always there. The question was how the company would pull it off. That evening, I realised how far along its efforts had come.
“One of our fundamental thesis [at Big Cabal Media] is that having a single revenue line is death for any media business. For any media business to thrive in the long term, they need to have multiple revenue streams that are working well at any given time,” Aladekomo tells me.
Native advertising remains important to Zikoko, but it has added to the mix newsletter sponsorships, sponsored social media posts, paid events like Zikoko Fest, merchandise sales, and sponsored editorial projects such as Jollof Road.
Perhaps the best way to distil Zikoko’s story is to say that its evolution mirrors that of youth and Internet pop culture in Nigeria. Lawal says, “I feel like Zikoko is holding a mirror [up to society]. That's why people see stuff there and recognise themselves, even though it was mostly funny stuff. There were heavy cultural themes to it. I think that Zikoko is also working to be a magnifying glass for society. [It focuses] on stories that people would normally ignore and never stop to think about. I don't think there is anybody in this country doing it the way Zikoko is doing it.”
He’s right.
From next month, Communiqué will be coming to you weekly, every Tuesday at 7 AM (GMT+1). You will get the monthly essay first, followed by shorter weekly updates. Through these updates, I will respond to specific questions about media and content strategy from the CMQ Community. I will also write about other topics inspired by the things I’ve read.
If you’d like to submit a question or suggest a topic for the weekly updates, please do so here:
]]>As the curtains fell on 2020, a small controversy peeped out from BBC Africa. Nkiru Mordi, the lead reporter on Sex for Grades, the British broadcaster’s hugely popular and percussive documentary on sexual harassment in universities, was accused of not “being the brain behind the project” and criticised for hogging the spotlight.
Mordi has never publicly claimed to be the “brain behind the project”. Nonetheless, she has won massive recognition and several awards for her work, including an Emmy nomination and an MTV EMA Changemaker award. Whether she intended or not, her prominence in the limelight created an impression that the documentary was her story when, in actuality, it is the BBC’s. Mordi experienced sexual harassment first-hand in the university (and ended up not graduating). This created a potentially compelling storyline and a perfect lead character.
Consequently, the BBC hired her as a freelancer and made her the lead reporter. However, a Premium Times report reveals a pattern within the BBC where in-house staff are often sidelined for big projects like this documentary. As a result, very rarely do the staff get any public credit for their work. This was not the case with Mordi. She did the job she was hired to, got into the trenches when she needed to, and has since reaped the rewards.
At no point did her non-ownership of the documentary detract from the awards and recognition. This is not unexpected. The story is (mainly) told in her voice and with her face, and her previous experience provided extra motivation. This was a risky move but has proved to be highly rewarding. In addition to the awards, Mordi has accumulated extensive social capital. Still, in legal terms, the story was never hers. At least not in a way that the law recognises.
In journalism, a story is credited to the person whose name is on the byline. If multiple journalists work on the story, there are multiple bylines. But ultimately, the copyright story belongs to the media company they work for (Section 9, subsection 3 of the Nigerian Copyright Act).
At the core of this topic for me is the controversy surrounding the Netflix movie, Oloture. It is an EbonyLife production, and (in my opinion) considerably based on the investigative report of Tobore Mit-Ovuorie, a former employee of Premium Times.
The journalist claims that Oloture is a rip-off of her life story. She is suing EbonyLife, demanding $5 million in compensation for copyright infringement, the inclusion of open and end credits that state that the movie is based mainly on her investigative story, and "restriction on any further exploitation of [her] published life story by [the company]". While I think her case is meritless, her grievances can be substantiated.
EbonyLife fulfilled its legal obligations by getting authorisation from Mit-Ovuorie's former employers to adapt some elements of her report into a film. She does not have a strong legal argument. However, beyond legality and hysteria, can we make a case for ethos? Knowing that the investigative report isn’t just a collection of news items or impersonal information, but a story infused with personal, near-death experiences, born of a journey that sent its author into a downward spiral, almost breaking her, a journey that traumatised her and pushed her into rehabilitation.
There is a philosophical element to this worth considering. In 2009, author and journalist Wendy Welch wrote a paper titled 'Who Owns the Story?'. She examines the concepts of individual and cultural ownership within folklore studies and the rationale that storytellers use to claim rights to a story. This is beyond copyrighting, lawsuits, and courtrooms. It is a matter of ethics. It goes beyond what the law says is right or wrong and explores how we think about essence.
Welch writes (emphasis mine):
Suppose Ann tells the story of her gynaecologist to a professional storyteller friend. That teller may ask Ann for permission to retell it publicly, with potential changes to make the story more performable. These changes could include removing or altering names, relocating the story in another time or place, and omitting or clarifying details for contexts that might include people who have less experience with gynaecologists. The friend may ask to tell it in [the] first-person, as if it had happened to her, or continue telling it as happening to Ann. She may seek Ann's advice, or consider how she crafts it an artistic decision in which Ann should not be involved. All these factors depend on, at the very least, her relationship to Ann, her expected venue for the story, and her personal ethics.
Add to this the fact that, in the professional storyteller's perspective on ownership, one widely accepted taboo appears: Telling someone else's personal story as one's own is bad behaviour unless permission has been given by the person to whom the story "really happened" and in some cases negotiation made regarding [the] use of first-person (p. 5).”
EbonyLife claims “Oloture is a work of fiction inspired by a variety of true events.” The company is well within its rights to say so. Still, it is difficult to see the many similarities between Mit-Ovuorie’s report (and her life story) and the movie and not consider the possibility that the latter is heavily influenced by the former.
Maybe EbonyLife and its CEO, Mo Abudu, are aware of this. Perhaps it explains why they reached out to Mit-Ovuorie, commending her work and pledging 5% of the revenue from the movie’s cinema run to her NGO (Media Initiative Against Human Trafficking and Women Rights Abuse). But that did not happen because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of cinemas that came with the lockdown. Abudu says Mit-Ovuorie was not the only one EbonyLife made the gesture to, but none of the other parties has their stories so prominent in the film.
Welch also writes that “Individual ownership becomes somewhat clearer when the story told is a personal story, including a story based on the experiences of others, yet told in the first person (p. 4).”
While Mit-Ovuorie has no legal claims to the report, the story is her experience and that experience intrinsically is hers. Therefore, a retelling of it (in any form or variation) requires her active participation. If she has lived it, she at least deserves a say in how it is retold. She also deserves far more recognition and guerdon for her work.
“I believe that if one is writing about a person or an organisation, they should have some ownership as well,” Laurie Garvin, a New York Times reader, comments in one of its opinion pieces.
She is right. When an element unique to a person’s life is to be commercialised, they should have a say in the matter. And if this argument does not stand because of a law, then it should stand for the sake of ethics. When someone puts their life on the line for something, they should benefit significantly from it if the chance arises.
If one journalist is allowed to enjoy the benefits of a high-risk-high-reward project that she has no legal ownership of, then is it out of order for another journalist to demand the same?
Updates:
An earlier version of this essay which referenced section 10(3) of the NCA has been corrected to read ‘section 9’.
I have published a rejoinder to this essay. It is a response from an intellectual property lawyer who provides another perspective to this argument. Read it here.
If you enjoyed reading this, please like the post and share it with the people you like.
]]>On Tuesday, CNN published an investigative report about the Lekki Toll Gate massacre of October 20, 2020. The report disputes the government and army’s fluctuating accounts of what happened that night. It found "evidence of bullet casings from the scene [matching] those used by the Nigerian army when shooting live rounds", verified video footage that "shows soldiers who appear to be shooting in the direction of protesters", and eyewitness accounts that confirm there were two separate rounds of shooting.
Mixed emotions surround the report. On one hand, there is a feeling of hope that accompanies further validation of what we already know and hope that the events of that night will count for something. On the other hand, there is a creeping feeling of despair that even though the tragic events of that night are now clearer than ever, no one will be held accountable for this and justice for the lives lost might be an illusion.
But amidst all this, there is a line of conversation that caught my attention. While many people praise CNN (and deservedly so) for the work they’ve done, there is a group that does so at the denigration of the local media. One Twitter user said, “CNN has done what no investigative journalism or tv network in Nigeria could do. Watching it now and it’s so graphic. But most importantly, with this, the truth of October 20, 2020, will never be misrepresented.” He eventually clarified his position: “At the same time, I credit @ARISEtv and other few Nigerian media outlets who consistently did a lot to ensure that the story of the #EndSARS was told even within the undemocratic setting we find ourselves.”
His initial sentiment is not uncommon. But there is a type of criticism of the local media that is valid and a type that is just unreasonable. This is the latter.
In the newsletter for October, I write:
“For the first few days of the protest, traditional media were largely silent. If you rely solely on local TV or print publications for news, chances are you were unaware or unsure what the protests were about, particularly if you live outside Lagos... There is anecdotal evidence from parents and older relatives who depend on local media for their news that they did not know a lot about the protests and were unsure what the protesters were agitating for.”
Criticism of the local media’s delayed reaction to the protests and the quality of coverage is fair, but what is unfair is the denigration of the work they have since done. The day after the massacre most newspapers nailed the story on their front pages like Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg. TV stations covered the shooting and its aftermath round the clock. Radio stations talked about it all day long. Before CNN’s report, Premium Times published an investigation into the events of that night. Nicholas Ibekwe, Head of Investigations at Premium Times, spent days talking to residents of Admiralty Way, Lekki Phase 1, a neighbourhood that is about 2 kilometres from the venue of the massacre.
The report included details of his conversations with the residents, eyewitness accounts, video evidence of a corpse floating on the lagoon near the neighbourhood, and pictures that contradict the accounts of the Nigerian government and the army.
That said, one thing stands out from the CNN report, and that is the quality of presentation in comparison with that of Premium Times. Nothing highlights this better than the bullets.
Both CNN and Premium Times got hold of the bullet casings from the massacre. But the former went one step further to obtain export documents that show where the bullets were purchased (Serbia) and to confirm that they were indeed purchased for the Nigerian army. This is crucial information that will swing a case in any impartial court of law. But it is also information that highlights just how far away Nigerian journalism is from the highest level. Two main factors contribute to this.
CNN is a well-funded machine with an army of reporters and newsrooms that have vast international experience and connections. Premium Times, for now, can’t compete with that. What’s more? For stories like this, CNN employs the services of an investigator (or investigators) who works alongside the reporters. The average Nigerian reporter does not have that luxury.
Furthermore, CNN is expected to rake in around $773.1 million in advertising revenue in 2020, an increase of 11.7% from the previous year. By contrast, Nigeria’s entire advertising spending was estimated at $456.4 million in 2019. So, CNN generates more from advertising in one year than the whole of Nigeria spends on it. It is also worth noting that more than $130 million of Nigeria’s ad spend goes to out-of-home advertising (OOH), B2B advertising, cinema advertising, and music advertising. And remember, advertising is the lifeblood of the media business. If media houses aren’t making as much as they’d like, it will show in the quality of their work. Furthermore, because local media are likely to be more concerned about surviving within the context of their environment than dominating globally, training and upskilling their journalists are either outsourced to the CSR initiatives of private companies and NGOs or aren’t done at all. What this means is that many of their journalists are stuck with skills akin to stale bread. Or that their skills are moulded by organisations with their own agendas that aren’t in the best position to train journalists for the job.
Beyond this, Nigerian journalists also have to deal with the weak execution of labour laws from both private and public sector employers, and a weak justice system. Many Nigerian journalists do not enjoy basic things like health insurance and legal services. Initiating legal proceedings is arduous, expensive, and unpredictable, so it’s discouraging to take cases to court. The easy way out is for them to stomach what they can get. This type of environment will affect anyone’s quality of work and willingness to go the extra mile.
In ‘The cost of good journalism’, I write:
“Nigeria is not the most conducive place for journalists. The country has consistently ranked low on the World Press Freedom Index. Right now, it sits at 115th out of 180 countries. In 2019, it ranked 120th and in 2018, it ranked 119th… According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 8 Nigerian journalists have been murdered in relation to their work since 1998… Not much has changed over the years… Nigeria is not more accommodating to journalists today than it was some years ago… The Nigerian government is not more transparent today than it was some years ago… It is difficult to do good journalism in Nigeria because the environment is just not designed for that.”
A few days after the massacre, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) fined ARISE Television, Africa Independent Television (AIT), and Channels Television N3 million ($7,762.91) each for using “unverified images of alleged shooting” in their reportage on the events of October 20. NBC’s actions have been criticised as an attack on press freedom and followed with a lawsuit from the Media Rights Agenda (MRA).
This is the reality that Nigerian journalists and media entrepreneurs have to face. Investigative journalism and incisive reporting don’t often result in corrective action. Instead, the journalists have to deal with censorship and, sometimes, threats to their lives and profession. In Nigeria, politicians or shady businessmen do not get exposed and then come out to cry and beg for forgiveness, instead they torpedo the journalists and platforms that exposed them. But despite all this, journalists continue to put in the work. That is commendable.
So, when criticising Nigerian journalism, we must do so with an appreciation of context. However, there are things journalists and media entrepreneurs can do better, things that are well within their control.
Journalism in Nigeria and running a media business in Nigeria are far from easy, but there are ways to make them less difficult and more effective.
For journalists:
Things like paying more attention to the quality of your presentation, regardless of your medium, understanding that what you’re telling people is just as important as how you’re telling them.
Learn how to enhance the way people experience your work, knowing that style is more attractive than substance initially.
Go a step further to verify the small details; identify time stamps on photos you source from social media before using them (here’s a guide on how to do that).
If your publication cannot afford copy editors, use free editing software to improve the quality of your work.
For media entrepreneurs:
Things like investing in the user experience and user interface of your website go a long way; it costs less to do that today than it did some years ago.
If you need to subscribe to AFP or Getty Images for access to their videos and pictures, do it, you can afford it.
Hire freelance editors and graphic designers if you can’t afford them full-time.
Buy corporate health insurance for your staff, there are relatively affordable options.
Above all, treat your journalists with empathy. They are the engine of your company, you have to protect them.
Some problems have plagued and will continue to plague journalism for years to come: The government’s blatant disregard for freedom of expression, the habitual abuse of power by people with the means to do so, the dwindling economics of the business, weak labour laws, etc.
But despite all these, very rarely do people judge journalists based on their efforts or intentions. They judge by the quality of their results, and this is where Nigerian journalists can do better. If you will go through the rigour of digging up the truth, defying the odds, and damning the consequences, if you will risk your life to tell a story that you know people need to hear, then it is more beneficial (for you and your audience) that you go the whole nine yards.
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]]>A common people strove in vain
To shame us unto toil,
But they are spent and we remain,
And we shall share the spoil
- Rudyard Kipling, 'The Song of the Old Guard'
Under the blackness of night, in the final hours of Friday, October 17, 2020, hundreds (maybe thousands) of young Nigerians stood in clusters around the country, lit candles and phones dotting the horizon. These young men and women, with tears and sniffles and silence, mourned the lives of their compatriots lost to police brutality. The mood was sober, but not without hope.
For more than a week now, they have come out en masse to protest against police brutality, a rampant disease in the country, one especially carried by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).
SARS was created in 1992 to combat an outbreak of robberies in Nigeria. But the group became the very thing it was made to fight against. SARS operatives often extort, sometimes kidnap, threaten, and even kill citizens. Nigerians have made countless calls to dissolve the group, with the government paying lip service each time. For 4 consecutive years (2017-2020), the government (or at least spokespeople within the government) announced the dissolution of SARS. Despite these announcements, the group has continued to operate.
So, young Nigerians, tired of the oppression and false promises, took to the streets to protest. The protests are mainly mobilised online. Social media posts call for people in different parts of the country to meet at specific spots. The demands are clear: that the government dissolve this rogue police unit and that all offending officers be charged. Online, there are videos, testimonies, and eye witness accounts of officers assaulting, threatening, and killing citizens. However, one thing that stands out is the attitude of the local traditional media to the protests.
For the first few days of the protest, traditional media were largely silent. If you rely solely on local TV or print publications for news, chances are you were unaware or unsure what the protests were about, particularly if you live outside Lagos. Ayomide Tayo, a journalist and Nigerian pop culture writer, says, “The initial response [of the traditional media] was slow. It was as if the seriousness of the protest caught them unaware.”
Ayodeji Rotinwa, Deputy Editor at African Arguments, says that there is anecdotal evidence from parents and older relatives who depend on local media for their news that they did not know a lot about the protests and were unsure what the protesters were agitating for.
Eventually, the traditional media woke up. But even then, their reporting has been shaky and riddled with misinformation. Yomi Kazeem writes this for Quartz Africa:
Around 3 pm on Monday, police officers in Lagos arrested entertainment entrepreneur Ademola Ojabodu while he was protesting in Lagos as part of nationwide calls for an end to local police brutality.
Within hours, Ojabodu’s family had learned that he was to be charged with the murder of a police officer earlier in the day. The news came after TVC News, a popular TV channel affiliated with Nigeria’s ruling party, reported that policemen had been shot during the protests.
In fact, a policeman had been shot and killed but, contrary to the narrative set out by some local broadcasters and the police, he had, in fact, died from accidental shots fired by his fellow police officers rather than by protesters…
In another instance, Vanguard, a widely read national newspaper, falsely reported that a protester who was arrested but later released had been raped in custody—a report she has also since debunked with her legal team mainly through social media channels.
In Rotinwa’s opinion, the traditional media has not given the movement “the sophisticated, thorough, and immersive coverage that it is very well capable of, with its resources and networks of reporters, correspondents, and editors across the country. When Occupy Nigeria was the front-burner issue in January 2012, the coverage was unrelenting. Earlier this week, I [came] across a newspaper that had the protest as a headline but then the continuing story was a footnote, crowded out by other issues. It was startling to see.”
Two issues are at play here. One, the protests have underscored the generational disconnect between traditional media and young Nigerians. Two, traditional media have been too comfortable with the status quo.
Both Tayo and Rotinwa agree that traditional media has lost its relevance to the younger generation. Tayo says, "There is a huge mistrust for traditional media right now. They are seen as pro-government and pro-status quo. While the new [media] are seen as the rebellious ones who want to narrate the frustrations of the younger generation."
Apart from the generational disconnect, the dynamics of the relationship between the government and the mass media also explain the attitude of the traditional media to the protests. As Rotinwa pointed out, there is a remarkable difference between local media coverage of Occupy Nigeria in 2012 and the 2020 #EndSARS protests. That’s because infringements on press freedom are worse now than in 2012. (You can read about that here, here, and here.) Regarding these infringements, Zainab Suleiman Okino, a journalist and editorial board chair at Blueprint, says:
"Although the government won their re-election, they are still not comfortable. They try to muzzle journalists who have views different from theirs. Going forward there’s palpable fear in the air, fear that Buhari’s past as Nigeria’s military leader might be re-enacted."
It follows that if the government feels threatened by protests, there could be hesitation from journalists to cover those protests. For the fear of their lives and their jobs. We’ve seen this play out before: the government does not like a narrative or publication and it either tries to silence the publication or put indirect pressure on it.
However, while this might (and I emphasis might here) explain the initial hesitation to cover the protests, it does not explain or excuse the eventual quality of coverage and the misinformation (and sometimes pro-government undertones) that came with it.
Traditional media houses are not investing enough to move with the times, Rotinwa says. While they have websites and some young employees, they are ultimately too comfortable with their advertising income streams and are not motivated enough about what comes next. While consumption trends favour new media, advertising, the lifeblood of the media business, continues to favour traditional media. As reported in The Guardian:
"In developed markets, internet advertising expenditures are expected to surpass TV, however, in Nigeria TV advertising is and will remain strong in the near future, a trend the latest data have shown… Of the N81 billion [of] advertising revenue recorded in the ATL [above-the-line] segment, television accounted for N29.4 billion [35.8%], followed by newspapers with N20.8 billion [25.7%]…"
The implication is that compared to developed markets where there is an imminent economic danger to traditional media (because digital audiences are evolving quickly and the market dynamics are deeper), that danger is not as immediate in developing markets like Nigeria. Traditional media still rakes in the bulk of the money and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Another thing worth noting is in how Nigerians consume news. Despite the growing influence of the Internet and social media, radio and television are still more dominant sources of news for Nigerians. However, those trends are moving in opposite directions.
While radio and TV remain the major way Nigerians get their news, the figures are falling and the numbers for digital consumption are rising. For example, the percentage of Nigerians who use radio as their primary source of news fell from 83.9% in 2012 to 77.4% in 2014, and the percentage for TV fell from 73.6% to 64% within that same period.
In his book The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, Paul Starr writes:
“The great political revolutions of the modern world…all raised the most fundamental questions about communications and knowledge, as they did about politics… In each case, revolutionary changes in politics brought about revolutionary changes in communications. (p. 5)”
Contrast the coverage of the protests by the traditional media with that of new media platforms like Zikoko, Stears Business, Native, The Republic, etc. and the difference is clear. One group was slow to action and nonchalant to an era-defining story, they just could not see it quickly enough; the other group has dedicated most of its resources and human capital to covering and analysing the protests.
The #EndSARS protest is a revolution, and revolutions like this one define history. Even more so for the local media. I see the already declining traditional media consumption figures falling even faster, especially among the younger demographic, a group that has seen repeatedly that with the right use of a mobile phone, you can get a message out, bring together millions of people, and start a revolution. So, when the dust settles, the people will remember who stood with them and who didn’t. They will remember who amplified their voices and who didn’t. They will remember that when called to battle, when called to fight alongside them, the old guard faltered. They will remember.
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]]>When I walk into Dele Momodu’s home office, he’s in the middle of a broadcast with his phone on a stand before him. The white fluorescence of a ring light bounces off his face, illuminating the wall of books behind him. I find out later that this is part of his company, Ovation’s new media strategy. 24 years after launching the magazine (and media company), he has learned that adaptation is the only thing that truly matters in the media business. “Embrace whatever it takes to reach your audience” is a mantra he lives by. Today, he is embracing the power of the Internet and mobile phone technology to reach his millions of online followers.
This is a long way away from the early days of his picture-heavy magazine that covers the life of the rich and famous, a magazine he started while in exile in 1996. “There were too many variables. I couldn't come to Nigeria to look after the business. Meanwhile, it is our biggest market. And as they say, another man's eyes can never be as good as your own. But we had no choice. We had to take the kamikaze plunge,” he says.
Unlike many of his peers, Momodu realised early that the Internet would change how people consume and interact with media. “A lot of my contemporaries went to sleep when social media came. They were underrating it, saying ‘Nothing will replace paper’ but something has replaced paper.”
When I ask him how the Internet and social media have affected his business, he replies that it has been positive. “For some, it has killed their businesses because they didn't react fast enough. I reacted, I responded, and I joined the race. And trust me, today, when we are talking about the [most popular handles] on social media, Dele Momodu Ovation is one of them. 1.2 million followers on Twitter (as at the time of the interview) and I'm sure in the next couple of days, it will hit 1.3 million (it has). That's not a joke for a 60-year-old man, and I do it myself. You can see I do everything myself, nobody is handling my page. Nobody ever touches my page. I do everything from here.” He motions to the large, crowded desk separating us. “You can see all my gadgets. Sometimes I DJ myself. It's about your ability to adapt to every new situation and I'm very excited about it.”
Sitting high on the wall to my right is a collage of his pictures with the rich, famous, and powerful. I spot an old photo of a young Bola Ahmed Tinubu standing beside him; in it, I imagine they are young idealists in the U.K. waiting to return home to Nigeria to begin life as we now know it. In other photos, he is smiling with Paul Kagame, Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga, Bill Clinton, and Emir Lamido Sanusi.
“My access is my asset. The reason Ovation is hot is that we have access to everybody. Dr Mike Adenuga, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, Femi Otedola, if you check my phone you'll see we were chatting this morning. I have access to virtually everybody. We've built enough credibility for anyone I want to reach to associate with us. The brand (Ovation) is worth millions of dollars, and we’ve built it for nearly 25 years.”
How has he been able to maintain these relationships over the years? “I'm loyal to my friends,” he says. “In the days of tribulations, they will find me standing behind or beside them. I will be there for them. When everybody deserts them, I will be there for them. No matter the situation, I will not prejudge. Because I have been a victim of misjudgment myself. When you have been a victim of something you will understand how he feels.”
I notice that when talking about Ovation, he switches pronouns often, even within sentences. In some places, he describes it as ‘we’, a corporate brand; in other places, he personalises it. “What I've done is to build a double-brand -- Dele Momodu Ovation. That's my strategy. Most people say ‘separate your personal brand from your corporate brand’. That's the theory. But I like to go against traditional theories,” he says.
I ask him what was going through his mind in the weeks leading up to the launch of Ovation in 1996. He likens the process to childbirth. “Starting any new business is always like delivering a baby,” he says. “You've been pregnant with ideas, expectations, and [questions about funding]. You're wondering what the first edition will look like. You're wondering if your baby will have any disability. So, you're [full of questions], but no answers, because of the unpredictable nature of the media. I had absolute faith in our ability to deliver a good magazine. What I wasn't sure about was sustainability.”
He had a business plan, he says, one that required £150,000 but he found it difficult to raise the funds. “I went to my bank, the National Westminster Bank, and the manager told me I had no record of doing business in the UK. I had no credit history, and I was not creditworthy at that stage. She told me pointedly that she won't be able to give us any loan.” However, the bank manager agreed to give him a £5,000 overdraft. That was nowhere near sufficient.
How did he get enough money to start? The bulk of it came from his uncle, Ezekiel Fatoye, who “scraped his savings to send us the first £10,000. We also sold a few things.” He adds that some of his friends contributed. “I didn't have the funding I required, but I'm happy I didn't have it. If I had that money, it would have spoilt me. I would have blown it. I would not have known how to micromanage like I do today,” he says.
Momodu decided that Ovation had to go big with its first edition. “You must start every publication with a bang. If you don't get that bang from day one, you may never get it again.”
On the cover of the maiden edition was Egyptian billionaire, Mohammed Al-Fayed, one of Africa’s richest men. “We wrote a beautiful story titled ‘The African King at Harrods and other billionaires’. He was so impressed when we sent it to him. He sent us bottles of wine, champagne, chocolates, everything. We knew that it was a good beginning. It re-energised us for the next edition.”
The second edition had Seal (Henry Olusegun Adeola Samuel) on the cover. He says, “At that time, most people didn't know Seal was Nigerian. They thought he was Brazilian or Jamaican. We spoke exclusively to his mom who was still alive [and] in Nigeria. That story made us a global brand. From the second edition, the highest circulating magazines in the world carried Ovation. They took our permission to reproduce the story. We had the National Enquirer, which was the highest circulating magazine in the US. We had The Globe in the US, we had The Mirror in London, they all carried it. It was like an advert for us. They wanted to pay me and I said no, money was not the issue for me. As long as you say ‘culled from Ovation International’, I'm okay.”
If he were to start Ovation today, Momodu says he would never attempt to do a monthly magazine. “At the very best, I would do it quarterly, not even bi-monthly. Because these days, the magazine business is shrinking, readership is shrinking, advert revenue is shrinking, distribution is shrinking. An average vendor is no longer willing to stand in the sun or the rain just to sell a few copies of magazines and make a pittance. The proliferation of social media has made the media an endangered species.” For these reasons, he says he would start it online and then “go for volume”, focusing on audiovisual formats.
I interject. “Looking at how many more platforms are now available and how much easier it is, compared to then, to startup a publication. How would you stand out?”
He replies, “Always, in any business, not just media, be original. There's something somewhere that someone needs that is not available. People say there's nothing new under the sun. There's plenty new under the sun. There's so much to do. For example, and I'm just using this example, people say Ovation is a luxury magazine, it caters only to the rich, it doesn't care about the poor. Well, somebody can start a poverty magazine and all you do there is publish poor people. Do you know it might sell? The charities might buy into it to advertise. Nobody has considered it. I wish I had free money to play with, I will try it. And I will call it ‘Poverty Magazine’. It will shock you, it might sell more than Ovation.” He laughs.
I ask him if this means there are many areas people are not exploring. “Oh, there are many. Now agriculture is the next big thing, you can do a magazine on agriculture,” he says. This is something I’ve written about in the past, niche publishing. However, something else that Momodu mentions during our conversation highlights the paradox of the media business in Nigeria, especially with new media. “Most of your clients want volume. If you have Globacom, it wants more people to buy more data and airtime. MTN wants the same. 9Mobile wants the same. They want volume, you must be able to deliver it.”
Read: Stears's $600k war chest (The 4 waves of digital publishing in Nigeria)
While there are multiple unexplored spaces, media companies must face the following realities: Nigeria is a poor country and for most members of the audience, paying for media content does not rank high on their scale of preference, especially if the content is undifferentiated. Next, for media companies to consistently produce differentiated content, they require a level of investment that is just not readily available. They also require most of their audiences to have considerable disposable income. Last, advertising remains the major source of revenue and the companies that are most ready to spend on advertising require volume. What this means is that media companies that want to play in unexplored spaces cannot do so because they will not survive long enough to prove their concept.
You are more likely to find a media company run by a journalist than a media company run by a trained/seasoned businessman. I put forward to Dele Momodu that one of the biggest challenges of the media business in Nigeria is that there aren’t enough good businessmen. “There may be great journalists and great writers. But businessmen, I don't think we have enough,” I say. He agrees.
“Our biggest undoing is that journalists fail to recognise that journalism, or media, is a business,” he says. “We treat it as if it's something anybody can run. You will see us making ourselves managing directors. Even if you're an MD, you need an executive director in [the accounting department]. You need an executive director in marketing, you need an executive director in production. If I can afford it today, I'll get anyone from any part of the world to come and run Ovation for me. And that's the only way I'll be able to sell my shares. I'm holding on to almost 70% of shares, I have other people who have shares in the company. The time has come for us to enjoy our sweat. But the only way we’re able to do that is if we go public or do private placements, which is what I prefer, anyway. That way, we can get like minds who understand the nature of the business and are people who are not desperate for profit. They want the brand to survive, and part of their dividend is knowing that they helped build a successful media outlet.”
As our conversation draws to a close, I’m curious to hear his thoughts about how the many patches of military interruption affected Nigeria’s democracy, the audacity of journalists, the kinds of stories that they can pursue, how they can pursue those stories, and the development of the media business. (There have been 7 successful military coups in Nigeria’s 60-year history.)
“Naturally, [it came with] loads of frustration,” he replies. “If you take the Concord press owned by Chief [MKO] Abiola, for example. They shut it down. In the same premises, he had Wonder Bakeries that was selling Wonder Loaf. They shut it down, and it never recovered. All the machines rot. The Punch suffered the same fate at some point. There were other newspapers shut down. Journalists were killed. Some were maimed. It affected the business.”
Read: The cost of good journalism in Nigeria
“These days, people find it very difficult to write what I call dangerous stories. People are afraid. Nobody wants to sleep in prison. I slept in prison. I was in exile. I could have been killed. Anything could have happened. We didn't have social media. Now you can hide behind your telephone and abuse the government. In our own time, we had to face bullets.”
Next, I ask him about the biggest challenges he has faced as a media entrepreneur in Nigeria. “Number one is always funding. Media is a casino. I call it the ultimate casino. It gulps a lot of money. I can spend £100,000 this month and I'm not sure I will recoup £20,000 out of it. No matter how much money you have, it will evaporate.
“I've also learned that the media in Nigeria is an abnormal business. If I used the conventional way of doing business, Ovation will not survive. Many magazines have come to publish like Ovation in Nigeria and never worked. Because they were using conventional styles. OK! came to Nigeria, it didn't survive. And these were the magazines we were copying from England. Someone bought the franchise of Hello! magazine, which for me is like the ultimate magazine I love, it still failed in Nigeria. It tells you that Ovation must have employed an unusual method. Our modus operandi has differed from day one, that we must give it whatever it takes and make sure it survives.”
I end our conversation by asking him what he has learned from covering Nigeria’s 1% over the years. He says, “A lot of our big men, distinguished personalities, hardly write their biographies. Chief [Antonio Deinde] Fernandez died without a biography. If there is any major story on him today, it's from Ovation. Chief Bode Akindele wrote a biography, but I doubt many people saw it. However, they remember that he was on the cover of Ovation two or three times. Chief Harry Ayoade Akande, we call him 'the Chicago billionaire', featured on our cover. It's easier to read a magazine than read a book on a continent like Africa where there is really no reading culture. And because people also like pictures, in looking at pictures, they might stumble on the story. That's part of our strategy. For me, [documenting] the lifestyle of the rich and famous has been very productive.”
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]]>In the twilight of Dele Olojede’s publication, NEXT, a workforce that had grown to over 190 was down to roughly 20 people, many of them owed salaries. While Dele admits he and the management team made several bad business moves, the publication’s demise was also partly caused by the strength and audacity of its reporting.
Dele Olojede says that if he knew everything he knows about Nigeria now, he would not have started NEXT. He founded the publication to provide Nigerians with the information they needed to make better decisions and to get leaders to “think twice before acting”. Within 5 years, NEXT introduced a brand of journalism that was unlike the status quo.
Here’s an excerpt that highlights just how committed the publication was to doing great journalism:
“NEXT went to places that other news outlets simply would not. The team exposed the fact that Nigerian legislators are the world’s most highly paid and least effective; and it contextualised that information in terms of the salaries of ordinary civil servants like police and teachers. It exposed [one of Nigeria’s richest men] for “forgetting” to pay tax for five years: he himself estimated he was $600 million in arrears. The authorities were embarrassed into reacting, the first time the apparent immunity of the rich and powerful was so publicly breached. NEXT precipitated a change in government by exposing that then-President Umaru Yar’Adua was brain dead, while the nation was being assured he would be returning to office. The team also broke the Haliburton scandal, which revealed that the oil company had bribed almost the entire Nigerian political elite.”
By 2011, it was out of business. According to Dele, distributors were bribed to exclude copies of NEXT from their newsstands, and this led to some advertisers pulling out due to the drop in circulation figures. Some other advertisers pulled out because they no longer wanted to be associated with the brand. Through various means, going as far as to blackmail, NEXT’s investors were put under pressure since they had most of their businesses in other sectors of the economy.
Dele also says that he "misunderstood the sheer difficulty of running a clean business in the Nigerian environment. If you don’t come from a position of real strength, the temptation to succumb is exceedingly high. You’re seen as an unreasonable person if you don’t hand out or accept bribes.”
NEXT was a successful experiment until it wasn’t. Bad management decisions aside, what the publication did was excellent journalism, the stories its reporters broke, and their impact on politics and business in Nigeria are sufficient evidence.
Good journalism tells the truth, no matter the cost, and it is loyal to the people, above all else. Truth-telling and loyalty to the audience require independence, reliability, accuracy, and transparency. It also needs money to thrive. Journalists need to be paid well enough to chase the stories that truly matter. But as Dele Olojede discovered, and he admits, Nigeria is probably not ready to pay the price for that kind of journalism.
There are many ways to define good journalism. Mercy Abang defines it as journalism that “digs deep and performs the surveillance function for society.” For Nicholas Ibekwe, head of investigations at Premium Times, it “must speak truth to power.”
As things stand, Nigeria makes no room for this and, so, the journalists dedicated to doing good work do it despite the environment. For some, they have to get out of this environment either by relocating from the country or rendering their services to Western publications whose audiences see Nigeria (and Africa) through a narrow lens.
To be a journalist in Nigeria, one who challenges the status quo, is to run the risk of losing your life or business. Eromo Egbejule, Africa Editor at OZY, says that to survive as a journalist in Nigeria “you have to follow the path of least resistance.”
Doing good journalism in Nigeria requires a robust cash flow and healthy business model that most media houses do not have. Doing good journalism in Nigeria also requires a dedication to truth-telling that could cost you your life.
Globally, journalism operates in three markets, as highlighted in Stephan Russ-Mohl’s The Economics of Journalism and the Challenge to Improve Journalism Quality (2006).
Market 1: PR experts and sources trade news to journalists in exchange for public attention.
Market 2: Journalists trade news and information to their audiences in exchange for money and their time and attention.
Market 3: Journalists (or media houses) trade the time and attention of their audiences to advertisers in exchange for money.
Market 3 is how journalistic platforms make most of their money. In an ideal Market 3, there is enough room for a variety of journalists and advertisers to transact, there is sufficient economic growth on both sides to preserve the balance of the relationship, and there is minimal interference from political figures. But Nigeria is far from being an ideal market. Here, the relationship between advertisers and journalists is skewed in favour of the advertisers, the market for journalism doesn’t seem to have grown much over the past decade or two, Nigeria’s economy is anything but great and, to a large extent, proximity to political power influences business and economic success.
It follows that journalists cannot do good journalism if they are unsure whether their employer will pay at the end of the month. They cannot do good journalism if the platform they work for is under-funded and, so, they do not get paid well and on time. They cannot do good journalism if their employer consistently neglects their welfare. They cannot do good work if the person who owns the newspaper or TV station where they work has obvious political affiliations and there are stories they just cannot pursue. They cannot do good work if their government treats transparency like a plague.
In some cases, journalists are owed financial benefits for months and even years. An example is that of Peter Ibe, a former editor at ThisDay. In 2011, he sued the publisher for withholding his salary and other entitlements, among other things, for many months. He also presented to the court how he had served as bureau chief of the newspaper in South Africa for 19 months and, during that time, the company did not provide his accommodation. Mr Ibe further asked that the court “order the Economic and Financial Crime Commission, the Press Council of Nigeria and the Federal Inland Revenue Service to investigate the defendants." In 2015, he was awarded N1 million in damages by the National Industrial Court in Abuja. His situation is not unusual.
It is common for employers to owe journalists salaries while expecting maximum productivity from them. It is also common for publishers to withhold the salaries of their reporters with the expectation that their income would come from “brown envelopes” or billing PR personnel for writing about their clients. The idea is that by hiring them, the publisher has given said journalist a platform they can then leverage to enrich themselves in creative ways while the bulk of the platform’s revenue from advertising and sales goes into the publisher’s pocket.
Nigeria is not the most conducive place for journalists. The country has consistently ranked low on the World Press Freedom Index. Right now, it sits at 115th out of 180 countries. In 2019, it ranked 120th, and in 2018, it ranked 119th. Reporters Without Borders describes Nigeria as “one of West Africa’s most dangerous and difficult countries for journalists, who are often spied on, attacked, arbitrarily arrested or even killed…The defence of quality journalism and the protection of journalists are very far from being government priorities.”
Dele Giwa, Godwin Agbroko, Tunde Oladepo, Fidelis Ikwuebe, Bayo Ohu, Enenche Akogwu. These are all journalists who have been killed over the decades with no one brought to justice for their deaths. Dele Giwa’s story, in particular, is the stuff of legends. I grew up hearing accounts of his death by mail bomb on October 19, 1986, and several conspiracy theories surrounding it. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 8 Nigerian journalists have been murdered in relation to their work since 1998. Many others have been imprisoned, tortured, or had their offices invaded by gunmen.
Not much has changed over the years. Nigeria is not more prosperous today than it was some years ago, so there’s even less money in journalism now. Nigeria is not more accommodating to journalists today than it was some years ago; we have already established that. The Nigerian government is not more transparent today than it was some years ago; there is still a lot of opaqueness. It is difficult to do good journalism in Nigeria because the environment is just not designed for that.
We cannot separate journalism and money; we cannot separate journalism and politics. From the very first days of the press until now, the nature and quality of journalism have always been defined by the economics and politics surrounding it. If journalists are not well-paid, and if publishers are not making enough money, they cannot do great work. If there is no freedom of expression, journalists cannot pursue the stories that truly matter.
A few platforms in Nigeria are looking at alternative and sustainable revenue sources to preserve their independence. We see more platforms publicly crowdfunding and asking their audiences to donate money. Last month, Premium Times’ editor, Dapo Olorunyomi, called on readers to join “a community that invests a modest donation to the making and sustainability of our accountability and fearless journalism .” More digital publishers are embracing the subscription model. BusinessDay and Stears Business are building their model partly around this. More platforms are selling special reports (TechCabal and Techpoint are examples) and promoting paid events. We also have publications running on donor funds and grants, which is neither ideal nor sustainable.
READ: Communique #01 - Stears's $600k war chest
The conversation about the cost of journalism and the business models that support it is one worth having with more intensity and far greater excogitation than we have displayed so far. It is a conversation worth pouring millions of dollars into. If for no other reason, for the good of the people that journalism serves and for the future of a profession that must exist to keep society in check.
We have seen what the scarcity of good journalism can do to a nation, is this how we want to continue?
I’ve been writing Communiqué for over a year now, and each edition requires hours (sometimes days and weeks) of research, thinking, writing, editing, and design. So, if you find the insight that I provide valuable, please do me a favour: like the post and share it directly with at least two people you think will love it.
Also, if you like the quality of work that goes into the newsletter, I offer the same quality of writing, research, and consulting services to corporate clients. Reach out to me and let's talk.
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]]>Preston Ideh makes it clear early in our conversation that he and his co-founders always knew their publication was never meant for a mass audience. They did not intend to play the reach game on which digital publishing currently subsists, a game that depends largely on page views for revenue. Their focus from the start was not on the number of readers or visitors, but on the quality of content. Just last month, the company, Stears, raised $600,000 in seed funding from Omidyar Network’s Luminate to fuel its departure from this status quo.
The funding will go into building out the company’s media arm, Stears Business, expanding its product offerings (more on this later) and, most importantly, growing its data and research business, Stears Data.
Ideh, who is the CEO, says that Stears’ guiding principle from inception was to provide high-quality information, and integral to this goal is the writer. He explains that the writers are the channels through which the publication provides the high-quality information that its audience needs. So, by investing in them, Stears ensures consistently high-quality content. “We invest in training our writers to the point where they would be able to sit beside CEOs and executives on a panel and produce the same level of insight, not as moderators but as co-panellists,” he says.
The company has been around for roughly 4 years but its publication has quickly cultivated an audience of young people curious about the Nigerian economy and how it works, and an audience of decision-makers within organisations who need high-quality data and information. It belongs to a subset of Nigerian digital publishers building their brands and business models on community and engagement, a departure from a status quo obsessed with reach. A new wave -- the fourth wave -- of digital publishing in Nigeria.
To better understand this, let's run through history quickly.
The rise of the bloggers.
The legacy publishers strike back.
The “new” publishers.
The merchants of engagement.
The mid- to late-2000s saw the creation of blogs by young people growing up as the Internet gained a foothold in Nigeria. Very few people knew or understood what it was at the time. But as it slowly found its way into our homes, our content consumption habits changed, and these young people saw an opportunity to bring news and content online.
They created blogs and often republished stories from newspapers, radio, television, etc, tweaking the content for their audience.
The bloggers became successful and their audiences expanded. Soon, legacy publishers awoke to the reality of the Internet. It was here to stay and they needed to make a play. They created their own websites and began dumping stories from their newspapers online. To them, the Internet was just another way to publish their newspapers. Punch Newspaper came online, as did Vanguard, The Guardian, The Nation, and The Daily Sun, among others.
What the bloggers understood that the legacy publishers did not was that Internet culture was different from newspaper culture. The Internet was not just another way to publish newspapers, it was a world on its own, complete with distinct reading habits and user behaviour. Furthermore, the Internet and Internet user behaviour were evolving faster than the legacy publishers could keep up with. So, they struggled, and this ushered in the next wave.
While the bloggers mastered how to grab attention, they had to contend with questions surrounding credibility. The legacy publishers, on the other hand, opened up (albeit it slightly) to the idea of the Internet but still did not understand how it worked. There was a gap of credibility and understanding (of Internet user behaviour) to be filled. Enter the “new” publishers, a collection of publications created specifically for an online audience by people who were now used to consuming content online. Pulse, YNaija, Naij (now Legit.ng), NET.ng, and Sahara Reporters are notable members of this class.
As the Internet evolved, the “new” publishers became attracted to reach (page views and audience size) as the primary measure of success. The more people they could reach, the more revenue they could generate from advertising and sponsorships. Much like the traditional media before them.
However, with time, the digital publishing market became oversaturated. Market dynamics changed: because the Internet was now relatively more available and cheaper than before, anyone could open a website or an Instagram account, build a large following of their own without having to reveal their identity, and curate news and content from the unlimited supply of information available. In other words, it became cheaper to set up digital publishing businesses, compete with the same type of content and for the same type of audience.
Then there was the advent of Facebook and Google as content distribution and discovery channels which shrank the return on investment from reach and advertising. For advertisers, Facebook and Google offered more control and a larger audience; for consumers, more content than any single digital publisher. The reach that the “new” publishers fought so hard to build as an asset became their Achilles heel. They had designed their operations and business models around it, but now they were exposed.
The next wave of publishers came into a market where it no longer seemed sensible to build a publishing business on reach as the core metric. Attention is a limited resource and people can only consume so much content. There is now more content on the Internet than there has ever been in human history. So, if attention is limited and content nigh-infinite, audiences will naturally prioritise what meets their needs, content they can easily discover and relate with, content that makes them look and feel good.
The current wave of publishers focuses on building communities and actively engaged audiences around specific themes. It no longer makes sense trying to be everything to everyone. So, we see publications like Zikoko targeting a young audience driven by social media culture; we see Native Magazine targeting an audience of Generation Z music and pop culture enthusiasts; we see The Republic targeting an audience hungry for smart political commentary; then we have Stears.
For all of these publishers, content differentiation and audience engagement are important. However, their inability to compete on the basis of reach means they will not have as much access as they would like to the digital publishing industry’s biggest revenue source, advertising. (It is worth noting here that for some, the inability to play the reach game is deliberate and a consequence of the nature of their content and operations, while for others it is that they do not have the mechanisms and resources to.)
For many advertisers, it matters less how engaged an audience is with a publication’s content and more how many eyeballs it can attract. If you have ever sat in on pitch meetings with potential advertisers, you would have noticed the difference in their reactions to 1 million monthly page views versus 20 million monthly page views. These are the dynamics that the new wave of publishers like Stears have to deal with. The market is saturated and the ROI on reach is decreasing, however, advertisers are still in love with it. So, there are two options: succumb to the status quo or face the headwinds and explore other business models.
With the $600,000 investment in the pipeline, Stears is growing its team and launching new products: the first is its subscription-based premium content category, the second product is the Daily Briefing (which offers a quick analysis of the news and can be delivered via WhatsApp), and the third is Stears Data Reports. Stears is also investing heavily in technology. It has built its own data platform, CoreData, and is hiring loads of developers.
The company’s plan is simple -- it is not easy, but it is simple -- create content and provide data services that people can pay for and get them to pay for it. The general perception is that the subscription model cannot work for digital publishing in Nigeria. This is because people think about it the wrong way, Preston tells me.
He says, “When people say subscription does not work, they probably mean it in the sense that it does not work as a media product. And the media is a subset of the information industry. It is easier to pay for information that helps you make smarter decisions and puts you one step ahead of everyone else than it is to pay for news. The news appears as a commodity, it is not very valuable as a product and there is little to no differentiation. The kind of (specialised) information an investment bank would produce is available to paying clients. We (Stears) do not see information as just a media product.”
Here, I agree with him. The subscription model does work, it just depends on what you are asking people to subscribe to. Audiences will subscribe to a product/service as long as it is exclusive and they can derive enough value from it. That is, if it is content that they need but cannot get anywhere else, they will open their wallets. News and undifferentiated content do not fit this mould.
Let’s take Multichoice and Startimes as examples. Multichoice says it has about 14 million subscribers and Nigerians make up 40% (or more) of that; it gives its audience access to some of the top football leagues in the world. Startimes says it has 3 million subscribers in Nigeria and it does the same to a varying degree, among other things. Both platforms give their subscribers access to sporting and entertainment content that they normally would not get elsewhere.
By choosing not to move with the status quo and play the traditional game of reach and quantity, Stears avoids fighting in a crowded arena. However, it also deprives itself of the media industry’s biggest revenue source, advertising. In Nigeria, advertisers are attracted to page views, and page views are stimulated not only by content quality but by quantity.
To make up for this, Stears is challenging on another similarly competitive stage, but one with potentially higher returns -- research and data analysis. Stears’ competitors are no longer just the digital publishers we have spent the last few minutes talking about, now it must fight with the likes of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), McKinsey, KPMG, Accenture, Bloomberg, and several investment firms. What Stears has as its advantage, however, is an already locked-in audience primed for upselling, much like Bloomberg. (I should mention that in June 2019, Stears hired Fikayo Akeredolu, a former Sales Country Manager for Bloomberg Nigeria and Cameroon, to lead business development.)
See it this way: Stears Business (the publication) is how Stears (the company) shows readers and potential clients that it does not compromise on quality. It is how it inspires trust. To use marketing terms, Stears Business is at the Top of the Funnel, creating awareness, then moving you further down to the middle where you could become a subscriber or a customer. At this point, you can sign up to the newsletter and/or Daily Briefing, then go further down the funnel to become a paid subscriber or, if you are an organisation, request and pay for custom data.
Will this model work, especially in Nigeria? I am uncertain, but Preston thinks it will. “BusinessDay has 12,000 subscribers, if we had numbers in that range, we would be happy,” he says. This is why I think Stears cannot shake off reach as a factor for success, and playing this game requires a different kind of setup than the company currently has. The company currently employs 7 editorial staff and will only expand “as the need arises, not to increase content quantity, but to improve quality.” This is where I disagree.
What McKinsey, KPMG, and Accenture may lack in ownership of content distribution channels, they make up for in their relationship (with the press), manpower, and incumbency (they have been in the game for much longer). For Stears’s data arm to succeed, its publishing arm needs to extend its reach to a point where audience size can become an advantage. Therein lies the challenge, one that Preston is aware of.
When I ask him about it, he replies by illustrating that Stears is betting on the idea that if you run one show very well in your auditorium, your audience will grow because people who loved it will go out to tell others whom, in turn, will come to see it. This is in contrast with running multiple shows in the same auditorium to attract more people. Still, there can only be so many people interested in one show; at some point, you will have to introduce new ones to keep them coming back. It is at this point that your commitment to quality will be tested.
The more people Stears can reach, the more people it can convert into subscribers, paying customers, and clients, and the more leverage it can build to compete in its new arena (I use “new” here loosely). One positive for it is that it now has $600,000 to experiment with. But as always, the devil is in its execution.
I’ve been writing Communiqué for over a year now, and each edition requires hours (sometimes days and weeks) of research, thinking, writing, editing, and design. So, if you find the insight that I provide valuable, please do me a favour: like the post and share it directly with at least two people you think will love it.
Also, if you like the quality of work that goes into the newsletter, I offer the same quality of writing, research, and consulting services to corporate clients. Reach out to me and let's talk.
If you enjoyed this, please don’t forget to share and tell other people about Communiqué.
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