Four years ago in July 2017, when I was starting my first high profile assignment in the Nigerian media space as a writer on The Other News on Channels TV, my American trainer Dillon Case gave me some advice that changed my life. At the time, I had only an anonymised social media presence because I thought that my job started and ended in the Writers Room every week at Isheri, and I did not want it getting mixed up with my Twitter and Facebook personas. Dillon told me something I had never heard before.
He said “Start using your real name on all your social media and take a look at how prominent American and British journalists and TV writers curate their social media presence. Find a way to do something similar in a way that works for you.” Up until that point, I had never considered bringing the personal and professional halves of my public presence together because I thought that the job of a journalist or broadcaster was at odds with the reality of them having unscripted exchanges and colourful personalities outside of the work space.
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But I took Dillon’s suggestion seriously and I revamped my social media presence. Over the next 2 years, I meticulously curated my feeds to reflect the amount of work I was doing, and it paid off really well – better than I could have ever expected. Since I started actively curating a journalism brand on social media 5 years ago, I have worked on high profile stories, I have achieved some significant impact and I have picked up 3 individual awards along the way.
There are 2 key things I have picked up over this period and they are as follows:
Social Media is now part of the job, and unavoidably so
A lot of journalists, particularly those of us who work for the so-called “legacy” media platforms like the established daily newspapers and broadcasters are scared or suspicious of social media. Many of us see it as a wild, unregulated space, which offers an existential threat to our careers. Others see it as a space where one can easily say the wrong thing, unravel and lose one’s professional credibility – which is like food and water for a journalist.
What I came to understand was that social media is indeed very much that – many a respected journalist has found their star dimmed by the instant petty drama and horrible pile-ons of Twitter. Drop an ill-considered take on an issue and you might just be kissing your career goodbye! What is also true however, is that it can be co-opted into a tool to cultivate new audiences and grow our existing ones.
What you get out of it is pretty much what you put in. With the right phrasing, several ounces of patience and a consistently razor sharp level of insight, a journalist can indeed ride the social media beast and use it for constructive purposes without accidentally self-immolating. And speaking of self-immolating…
Journalists are allowed to have and express opinions
The classical idea of a journalist was that of a position-free, ideologically vacant abstraction whose job was to present “all sides” of any issue and “leave the audience to make up their own minds.” In reality, as is now well acknowledged, this abstraction is above all else, a lie. There is no kind of human being without thoughts, opinions and biases of their own – just as being a doctor does not preclude one from having less than perfect health.
The 21st Century African journalist must recognise that our audiences are smarter than ever before. The Internet has democratised information in such a way that human society has never previously witnessed. These audiences are smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. They are smart enough to see through subjective attempts at abstract “objectivity” and they are also smart enough to differentiate the person on Twitter from the byline on a news platform, even though they are both the same human being.
If we are to be better at future-proofing our profession than the bumbling failures currently dragging out the world’s longest losing battle against social media in Maitama, we must be brave enough to put ourselves out there in ways that our predecessors could not or would not. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
In the words of a famous social media thinker, “Take risks and succeed!”
