The Publisher of The Eagle Online, Dotun Oladipo who died recently granted an interview to Yes International Magazine three years ago on how to excel in online news publishing. Our intern, Obianuju Nwabueze Obianuju transcribed the interview for your reading in his memory.
How often should a website post stories?
Oladipo: Around the clock as often as you possibly can. Someone once asked me if posting six stories a day was enough. I told them it’s fine, but at The Eagle Online, we run 80 to 120 stories a day. We might slow down to 60–80 on Fridays and Saturdays, but from Sunday through Monday, you won’t find us posting fewer than 60, and it often climbs to 120.
At some point, you also need to treat video as its own channel rather than something that only feeds your search traffic. Build out a YouTube presence you can eventually monetize on its own. That said, pairing every story with a video helps too audiences clearly gravitate toward video, and to photos as well.
What’s the best time to publish?
Oladipo: That depends entirely on your audience. We study our analytics closely before making that call. About 90% of our readers are in Lagos, so we asked ourselves: when does Lagos wake up? Around 5 a.m. But people aren’t reading news the moment they open their eyes; they’re getting ready for the commute. The real traffic window is 6:30 to 8:30 a.m., then again from about 4 to 8 or 9 p.m., when people are heading home.
We also get readers from the US, South Africa, Germany, the UK, and France. So for stories relevant to North America, we time posts around noon Nigerian time when they’re waking up and again in the evening, when they’re winding down. You have to be strategic about it, deliberately so.
Based on your experience, what kind of stories do people actually want to read?
Oladipo: Nigerians, generally, want something uplifting rather than something heavy. Yes, a story like “official steals ₦110 billion” matters and gets reported but people would rather watch Tobi Amusan dancing after winning a medal. That’s just the reality we’re seeing.
There’s a kind of collective fatigue with the heavier stories. People gravitate toward what lifts their mood a Buga challenge, a Davido dance clip, even a governor-elect dancing in church. Some ask how you attract “serious” or elite readers if you’re running lighter content. But that assumption doesn’t hold the same audience that reads hard news is often reading the lighter stuff too. Think of how many people quietly followed the old newspaper cartoons or the racier tabloid columns back in the day.
The numbers back this up. Even print publications now check with their online teams before deciding what to lead with the next day: “Which of yesterday’s stories performed best?” If I was editing a paper, I’d post two or three teasers online around 5 p.m., see what got traction, and that tell me what to put on tomorrow’s front page. You’re not forcing anything on readers you’re following what they’ve already told you they want.
What advice would you give a journalist trying to survive in today’s media landscape?
Oladipo: Stay current. Know the trends, and don’t delude yourself into thinking the old rules still apply. Journalists used to draw sharp lines “this is a serious paper,” “that’s a junk magazine.” That line has all but disappeared.
At one newspaper I joined, I spent a few weeks studying the operation and noticed a weekend edition was running hard political stories on a Saturday. So we restructured it split the paper so political news led the front page, and entertainment content, including celebrity and Nollywood stories, had its own front-page presence too.
It wasn’t an easy call, because dailies like to project a certain seriousness. But ask yourself: does a bank MD really not want a lighthearted read after a stressful 10 a.m. meeting? Don’t operate under the illusion that your audience only wants gravity.
You have to know your audience and position yourself for survival. We’re a country of roughly 200 million people. Even if only 20 million of us read regularly and increasingly that’s online rather than print everyone has different needs from their news.
So, you run your standard stories: policy announcements, National Assembly updates. But something like “10 ways to keep your partner satisfied” isn’t a distraction from that it’s often what draws readers in, and once they’re on your site, they find the serious stories too.