Newspapers confident in spite of proliferation of online publications
Though online journalism is still at its infancy in Nigeria, newspapers are already struggling to keep pace with the speed of the digital media. Some of the very vibrant online publications in Nigeria at the moment include Sahara Reporters, The Will, the Newsdiary, Nigeria Politics online and Huhuloneline. Newspapers also compete to update their online […]
Though online journalism is still at its infancy in Nigeria, newspapers are already struggling to keep pace with the speed of the digital media. Some of the very vibrant online publications in Nigeria at the moment include Sahara Reporters, The Will, the Newsdiary, Nigeria Politics online and Huhuloneline. Newspapers also compete to update their online editions, specially when there is a breaking news.
For example, on the day the Louis Edet House was attacked by a suicide bomber, the Daily Trust website was stretched to a halt by the volume of traffic on the video of the first official press briefing by the police on the incidence. The video had to be removed for the site to regain its speed.
So, are the newspapers losing readership to the online publications in Nigeria? The Chief Operating Officer of Peoples Daily newspapers, Alhaji Ali M. Ali doesn’t think so. He believes the technology of the digital media is yet to be as available and accessible as to make newspapers in Nigeria jittery. That will take years to come, he says.
He said: “Some of us in the industry spend hours looking at the internet, looking at ipads, looking at laptops and so on, watching television and listening to the radio. We still go back to the old hard copy because there is nothing like reading a hard copy. And people are ready to read the following day.”
Hajia Zainab Okino, the Executive Editor of Blueprint newspapers agrees with the Peoples Daily official, although she doesn’t go online for more than a look at the summary of the news.
She adds: “Besides, don’t forget again that it is not everything that is published online. So, if I want to enjoy news material, I don’t go online. I go online to look at the summary and have a fair idea of what is going on in the country or in the world. If I want details, if I want to educate myself, I go to the newspaper.”
In a fast changing world where yesterday’s magicians easily become muggles, one may be tempted to start singing requiem for the newspapers once those addicted to it leave the stage for the social networking young stars. That will be too early, according to Alhaji Ali M. Ali. He believes the current form of online journalism often lacks one of the fundamental features of good news story: accuracy.
“They break the news, but they are not in-depth. I really don’t see blogs constituting a major threat to newspapers. You know, there are certain cultural persuasions, like I said. People up North listen to the radio. You know, if you go to the countryside, the nomadic Fulani cattle rearer has the transistor radio. So, more often than not, they are well ahead of those who read the papers in the south, because the southern reader has to wait till the following day. But the danger here is, even (with) the proliferation of blogs and internet-based media, they are often off the mark because they rush to break the news first. Sometimes they are factually incorrect. And with time people will learn to distrust them. Again, because of certain political interests in a country like Nigeria, some online publications operate from unknown addresses and therefore what they publish on their blogs cannot be trusted. Often times, those of us in the hard copy genre of journalism, the newspaper, are usually maligned by the bloggers.”
But Sunday Dare, a media analyst, believes that the relationship between the mainstream media and the online media is symbiotic with the later posing no threat to the former.
He recently told the Qatar-based Aljazeera’s Listening Post that: “A large percentage of Nigerians still trust news and information from the mainstream media, far and above internet-based websites.”