234 NEXT newspaper suspends daily edition

NEXT, which first debuted as a Sunday paper is published by Timbuktu Media Publishing Limited owned by the Pulitzer-award winning journalist, Dele Olojede. Its exclusive stories coupled with its international –approach to news reporting and glossy design, made it a newspaper to beat. Timbuktu Media was founded in 2004 by Olojede, Africa’s only Pulitzer Prize […]

NEXT, which first debuted as a Sunday paper is published by Timbuktu Media Publishing Limited owned by the Pulitzer-award winning journalist, Dele Olojede. Its exclusive stories coupled with its international –approach to news reporting and glossy design, made it a newspaper to beat.

Timbuktu Media was founded in 2004 by Olojede, Africa’s only Pulitzer Prize winner and former Foreign Editor of the New York Newsday.  The media group is primarily institution-funded, in addition to a small group of private investors, with little input as to the editorial direction of the company.

It was believed that the paper which carved a niche for itself during the Yar’adua’s ill-health controversy, and subsequently nosedived into near oblivion after the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan became acting president and subsequently president after Yar’adua’s eventual death.

Things started falling apart when the newspaper started trimming its limited work force recently due to financial challenges. Sunday Trust learnt also that the editor of the paper, Kadaria Ahmed has since resigned her appointment with the company.

The NEXT publisher had in 2005 won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his “fresh, haunting look at Rwanda a decade after rape and genocidal slaughter had ravaged the Tutsi tribe.” The series was viewed as a major accomplishment for black journalists. Olojede was assisted by African American photographer J. Conrad Williams, and much of the series was edited by Lonnie Isabel, another African American journalist who was the assistant managing editor for national and foreign coverage.

Earlier on June 6, 1988, Olojede joined Newsday, the Long Island-based newspaper, as a summer intern. He eventually became a special writer covering minority affairs. In 1992 he began work on loan to the paper’s foreign desk, making several trips to South Africa. He became the paper’s United Nations bureau chief and then an Africa correspondent, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Olojede later worked as a correspondent in China, then returned to Long Island where he became foreign editor of Newsday. In 2003, Olojede took an opportunity to return to Africa as a correspondent to write about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, 10 years later.

In April 1994, when the genocide broke out in Rwanda, Olojede was covering the South African general elections, the first free elections at the end of apartheid. Olojede’s 2004 series on the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide was well received. One story that drew particular attention was “Genocide’s Child” about a mother who was raising a son conceived during a gang rape during the war.