Frank Aigbogun, the publisher and chief executive officer, BusinessDay Media Limited, has said there are growth opportunities in digital journalism in the country.
Research has shown that digital journalism has opened up new opportunities for news to be explored from time to time in possible angles, according to him.
Since the advent of digital technology, a lot of changes are happening in the world of journalism.
“The transition has been made possible by digitalization in journalism and good journalism must be paid for and only good journalism would save journalism,” Aigbogun said during a webinar on ‘Journalism in the Digital Age: Essential Skill Requirements’ organised by School of Media and Communications (SMC), Pan-Atlantic University.
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The publisher in his presentation titled, ‘Journalism in the Digital Age: Myths and Realities’ said that the digital era has made it easy for journalists to specialise in any aspect of the profession.
“Journalists don’t know mathematics, but in today’s journalism where data journalism comes to existence, any journalist that cannot talk about data or ratio has no place in journalism today or tomorrow,” he said.
“The reality of journalism in a digital age is the increasing popularity of citizen journalism and the rise of solution journalism,” he added.
The media expert emphasized that there are intersections of journalism and technology, adding that there are different forms of technology that has become almost the lifeblood of journalism in today’s world.
According to him, there is also an evolution of talents in the newsroom. He noted that the valuation for newspaper is still traditional.
He said the face of today’s journalism is fact-checking, research, explainer, and multimedia storytelling.
“The most important innovation to succeed in the digital age of today is to migrate from Ad revenue to reader revenue, those that have succeeded today are those that have moved advertising revenue to reader revenue,” he said.
“The truth of the matter is the advantage of digitalization in the scale that it offers has not been fully leveraged or taken advantage of,” he stressed.
On advising what’s next for publishers, Aigbogun noted that there is a change in consumer behaviour around the world and the newspapers are trying to alien and follow their audiences.
“We are going after them, providing them our services in whatever form they choose to consume. Certainly at a fee and not free,” he said.
“If in 2020 a publisher is not charging for digital content, such publishers should not be publishing, let alone journalism because they are headed on a path that goes nowhere. That is the reality,” he emphasised.
He, however, advised publishers look at paywalls, stating that media organisations can increase their subscribers revenue by creating paywalls.
Earlier speaking at the opening remark, Ikechukwu Obiamyan said it is very fitting for journalism in the digital age and it is very important to us as a journalist to be better equipped and pay attention and learn.
