I will start this column as I often do, with an anecdote from my childhood. I must have been 12 or 13, and I was on a midterm break from school. I was bored of sitting around in the house and I managed to convince my dad to let me accompany him to a meeting he was going to in Ikeja, Lagos.
Now, dad typically wore a simple shirt and pants or a safari suit when going out, but on this day he went with a shirt, a tie and a coat. He also made me dress up similarly. “This must be a very important meeting,” I remember thinking.
It turned out to be a meeting with a senior journalist at Vanguard newspaper in Kirikiri. The office was a beehive of activity, with several busy people scurrying around and a stern-faced security guard motioning us toward the staircase.
When we got to the office we were looking for, we were welcomed with the sort of formality and protocol reminiscent of say, a multinational CEO’s office or that of a ranking military officer. The reason, dad explained to me afterward, was that he was working with a group of investors who had a land dispute and were trying to get their story told in the news.
Getting something into the news, which meant going through the giant obstacle that was a newspaper and its plethora of protocols and processes, was a very big deal indeed.
A decade and a half later when I returned to Kirikiri Canal as an ambitious 24-year-old trainee journalist, the place was still a beehive of activity, but the layer of lacquer and gloss that the office once exuded no longer seemed to be there. When I spoke with acquaintances about getting a job there, everyone seemed to want to say something, but decided not to. “Best for you to experience it for yourself,” was the consensus. Later on, I found out why.
Legacy media is losing, but not as expected
There was a time when people spoke breathlessly about how the internet would disrupt newspapers, drive them out of business and change the entire business model of news and journalism.
Over the years, we have come to see that the death of the newspaper has been largely exaggerated. In Nigeria, print newspapers still manage 6-figure daily circulation figures. In the US, the New York Times does over $2 billion in annual revenues. The internet has indeed disrupted the business of news dissemination, but not in the way that many envisaged.
Where many assumed that readers would simply migrate online and ditch print, it has often been the case that older readers have migrated online and continued to read print, and younger readers who have grown up with online readership do not necessarily gravitate toward the online versions of the legacy newspapers.
In other words, a new online news and journalism ecosystem has been created that does not necessarily have much in common with the old guard. This old guard tried to replicate its existing offline model and style in the online world, and while it succeeded at first, it is slowly falling away. I would know, because I am part of this emerging ecosystem of Young Turks in Nigeria.
My Substack publication, West Africa Weekly, is not a newspaper or a conventional news platform. In my introductory post, I described what it delivers as “stylistically millennial storyline addressing key stories affecting Africa’s largest millennial population.”
In this publication, you can find uncensored profanity where it exists on external proofs and evidence. Standard past tense which the legacy media always uses to tell stories is not always used. Some existing conventions such as the outdated and repeatedly discredited “balance the story from both sides” thing are discarded altogether. The house style focuses fiercely on the twin pillars of evidencing all claims clearly and resisting cliche, boring or unengaging storytelling at all cost.
The result has been undeniably successful. In under 9 months,it has amassed over 16,000 email subscriptions, and every story goes out to an audience in the hundreds of thousands.
The best performing story on the platform to date, recorded over a million hits. Despite this, West Africa Weekly does not accept advertisements and is entirely funded by a startup grant from Substack itself and donations or subscriptions of readers. This is to maintain its editorial integrity and prevent external interest from introducing golden handcuffs into its reportage.
The gatekeepers hate it – but what can they do?
Which brings us to the question of the reaction from the legacy media spaces. In Nigeria, a vast majority of the online media space derive most of their funding from the donor/CSO circle, from government patronage and from rich patrons.
Absolute independence is not just a novelty in Nigerian online media, but an existential threat to it, because eyeballs often migrate to where they feel they receive the most value and their intelligence is least likely to be insulted by reportage that has been bought and paid for.
Read also: Nigerian Code of Corporate Governance 2018: Principle 9 – Access to Independent Advice
To cut a long story short, the legacy space absolutely hates me and everything to do with me. My name is regularly bandied about within industry WhatsApp groups as some kind of swear word, and my reporting and storytelling are rabidly monitored and harangued in search of the slightest error to hold on to.
Whereas the big legacy players in those spaces regularly edit, delete and unpublish stories without appending an Editor’s Note – which is extremely unethical, but this is Nigeria after all – the one time I made a minor attribution error on a story and corrected it with an Editor’s Note, this was seized on as some kind of major scandal and a crime against the profession.
Most recently, my story about the antics of Amnesty International’s Nigeria office was first of all strongly attacked by the usual suspects in these spaces. Shortly thereafter, one of them decided to reproduce the story under their own imprint, add a few extra quotes from people already quoted in the story, and publish it without properly crediting me. When I publicly challenged this, a flying monkey was dispatched to inform me that “I should be happy that they have chosen to build on my work.”
These and other experiences make it plain that the legacy players see West Africa Weekly and other emerging platforms like it as an existential threat to their business model. The basic unit of journalism of any kind is eyeballs.
Eyeballs mean money, whether online or offline; whether commercial or donor. We are taking away the eyeballs, which means that soon we will take away the money as well. These antics will actually intensify as West Africa Weekly and its contemporaries continue to grow and become more influential. This is not a mere prediction – it is a projection based on events that have already happened before in this and other spaces.
As they say, everything changes, but nothing really changes. Business models emerge and decline. Empires rise and fall. Reputations grow and get diminished. The legacy journalism model will not be the first business and career model to shrink and disappear into irrelevance.
Journalism itself will be fine, and will always exist in some form. A couple of centuries ago, someone who proposed handwashing by doctors as a solution to cross contamination in hospitals was declared a mad heretic and “not a real doctor.” Well, we all know how that turned out.
So my message to the gatekeepers – both real and imagined – is this: change with the times, evolve with the changing landscape, or die out and be irrelevant. David Hundeyin is not going to leave journalism for you, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
If you think about it too much instead of accepting it, you will cry blood.
