Our strength will be in reporting the unreported communities – The Authority MD, Onuorah

What informs The Authority as the name of your newspaper? By our name, The Authority, we undertake to be an authority in the business and profession of journalism. We are coming as a media outfit committed to reports with confidence rooted in certainty. We are here to drive the ideal of journalism, which is to […]

What informs The Authority as the name of your newspaper?
By our name, The Authority, we undertake to be an authority in the business and profession of journalism. We are coming as a media outfit committed to reports with confidence rooted in certainty. We are here to drive the ideal of journalism, which is to be authoritative in whatever we put out. We will report the truth with authority derived from verified facts.
How are you ensuring that your reporters are authorities in their own rights to be able to produce the kind of reports you have described?
First of all, we hired reporters we know are actually on their beats. Before we took off formally, we did training sessions for all our staff, for them to know where we are taking off and how we are to go. We impressed it on them that you don’t report anything until you are sure of it. We don’t want to publish reports over which we have to apologize later.
Poor pay and no pay at all in many cases have been blamed largely for the unethical practices in journalism. How are you addressing that?
If you are taking troops out for a mission, you have to take care of their interest first. If they know you mean well for them, if they know you have provided for them based on what you have, they will give their best according to established procedures. We have in-house rules that every staff knows. Beyond that we let them know that it’s not all about money. We make them accept that integrity is better than money. Even if money finishes, integrity continues to work for you.
We emphasize that yes, we need to make money – and we are giving them the salary that we have which is competitive in the industry. We tell them that a good name is better than a bag of money. We give them the much that we have and tell them to let us grow and earn more within the standards that we have set for ourselves. Here, we know very well that our name puts a burden on us. We know that we just must justify our name through every report we publish.
From your preview editions, it is clear that you are going daily from the start. Why are you not following the tradition of starting with a weekly edition?
It is a fact of life that when you stress yourself in the beginning, when you get going, you stabilize readily. It’s like an aircraft. It exerts great energy as it prepares to fly, so that once it takes off and gets to cruising level, what does it do? It gets on auto-pilot. We know it is not easy (to start with daily edition of The Authority) but we also know that the most difficult things are done by human beings with determination. We have the staff and we are determined. We don’t see any major challenge along the way.
Apart from starting out to be authoritative, what is your peculiar offering? What are you packaging that will make the public notice you?
We have in view the segments of life that are ignored by the established newspapers. There are certain regions, certain sections of the population; certain segments of the people everybody has ignored. We want to get out their own views, we want them represented; we want them heard. We want also to introduce the main market. The capital market and the money market are reported but nobody talks about the main market. We are bringing in populations that have been neglected.
When you say the main market, could you put it in other words?
The market in Idumota (Lagos), the market in Kano that ordinary Nigerians sell in and buy from. The markets in Kaduna, in Enugu, Port Harcourt; the people that make those markets what they are – they need to be projected.
You are based in Abuja and most newspapers publishing from Abuja have the North as their primary constituency. How are you going to be different?
There are areas of the North and aspects of life of northerners that these newspapers have not paid attention to. We are going for such areas and we are providing something different for our readers because we are in competition.
Many newspapers have come and gone in recent times. How do you intend to sustain The Authority newspapers?
Many people start newspapers as public service or as a political tool. If you start and run it as a business, you will not allow it to go down. Our own understanding, which is fundamental to what we do, is that you can’t be a successful newspaper unless you are successful as a business. We have to be successful as a business before we can become a successful newspaper. That’s why the way others recruit, it’s not the way we recruit. The way others start with jumbo salary is not the way we are starting. We are building a business.
If you cannot sustain yourself after a period of time, you have no business being in business. The problem with some establishments is that they start top-heavy, such that they can’t make enough money to pay salary.
Here we have our target of what we want to do: to proceed as a successful business. If you talk to those around here, they will tell you that money doesn’t fly around. Every expenditure made goes through checks and balances. It gives us focus and reminds us that we are not here for a jamboree.
You produced two preview editions last month and you have followed them with another special edition. What has been the response of the public to these test publications?
The response is great. The first was a trial edition and although we worked well on the content, we didn’t like the production quality. We went for the second edition and although we were also satisfied with the content, we didn’t like the quality of the production and so we corrected that in the third preview which was published on October 1. We’ve been improving and that’s how it will be. We will keep improving till we attain the perfection that we want.
Many newspapers start just before a major national event, such as the March-April general election. Did you fail a plan to start around that time?
This has always been the time we plan to start, because we aren’t coming out to work for any government but to do good journalism and run a good newspaper. The best time to start a good newspaper is when politics is low, when you can report the news dispassionately.
When will The Authority hit the newsstands on commercial basis?
We’ve fixed the 15th of this month to start rolling out the daily, Saturday and Sunday editions – hard copy and online.