Editor-in-Chief of Premium Times, Dapo Olorunyomi, in this interview with Seye Joseph at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism’s stakeholders meeting in Lagos recently speaks on the operations of Premium Times and other media issues in the industry.
What prompted the idea of starting Premium Times?
Premium Times is a child of necessity; let’s put it as simple as that. We had just come out of an experience at NEXT newspaper that everybody has generally spoken about. We had wanted to use the instrument of journalism in the true engagement with the community and also use it in the true terms and pattern in which the Constitution section 22 if you remember has asked that of all the institutions in Nigeria community, the media is solely given the responsibility to hold government accountable.
So in fidelity to that constitutional expression, NEXT was to be the instrumental mechanism to help actualize that statutory vision, the rest is the story. NEXT did very well editorially, helped to change a lot of practices in the media landscape, introduced new dimension both in page topography, website design, online reporting but unfortunately it could not be economically sustained. So after about two years, it was rested. We thought that the energy of the young people should not die and it will be a great shame because many of them have great idea they wanted for this great country and how journalism can be a great promise to realize such vision. So to continue the spirit of investigative newspaper in giving substance to that section 22 of the Nigerian constitution which we are truly passionate about holding economic, social and political power accountable, we said it is important to have medium.
What gave you the courage to start an online based news platform in a country where Internet has not penetrated many parts of the country?
The NCC which is the telecommunication regulatory agency had just completed an audit which suggested at that time that 127 millions Nigerians carry cell phones and a similar audit report was then out that 46 million Nigerians were on the internet. That data in itself means that everybody can do online banking, e-commerce. The truth is that the new paradigm for organizing society has moved beyond electricity as the dynamo for telecommunication that in itself has consequence for newspaper or media. For newspapering, what it meant is that you can now publish effectively online but it also signaled that we are moving in a very general global sense in the media ecosystem was also transiting, the ways news is gathered, process, edit, research and the way we write our stories. We had new configuration and if you resolve those contradiction what is meant is that the time to move beyond analogue publishing has arrived. So we were merely therefore answering to a reality and that reality is that the digital transition of our print media has begun and effective convergence of the media is a matter of reality. So hence we decided we could reach more people. It’s cost effective and the best thing to do was to publish online and it paid off and in less than three years we can reach about 40 – 50 million people on monthly basis. That is unthinkable and there is a decline in readership.
I can tell you today we have shot so far up except for the so called big three, Vanguard, Punch and The Nation. We are the fourth most read, so the big three should wake up.
In your own view, do you think newspaper in Nigeria is going on extinction?
It is just the fact that the economics to support the newspaper press is in crisis of a sort. The readership is obviously declining here. There are those who say the readership is peaking in Asia. I have no data to support but I trust those who say it. Professor Olatunji Dare had hinted at that in an interview with Kunle Ajibade and myself had with him in the new book that is there is and I know that my own boss in Pan African University had also made that claim but the truth is that in Nigeria, Africa and many part of the West, there is a massive decline in the fortune of the print press and it’s in two dimension. Circulation is falling and advertising revenue also is not growing and these are the revenue streams that support newspaper press. That is a serious crisis and characterize it as existential crisis. Having said that, I am not naïve to forget that some papers are still doing well. Some newspapers have reinvented themselves in one way or the other. I don’t believe that newspapers will go. If you study what is happening that we talked about, it is changing in four dimensions. It is changing in the way that we gather and distribute news, it is changing in the ways that the readers want to read news. So you have blogs, newsletters, specialized publication and some form of aggregation people do all about. And if you look at all that, you have to be little cautious in that hasty generalization that newspaper is dying. It will be reinvented into new expression but it probably not going to be the way we understand it now. Papers that are doing very well are those that have been able to complement their analogue feeds with their online presence so that you give push to the other. So that dual existence is helping to grow revenue. I don’t think the book will disappear just because of internet, it is too early to envision the future in that very long time view and make the kind of hasty generalization, judgment and conclusion that people tend to make about the death of the newspaper.
I am not one of those ones that will jump into that but I know there is a crisis. That crisis has to be resolved in one way. Some are already resolving it in a way and it’s solving revenue problem.
In news gathering skills for Premium Times, did you get the right people you needed knowing the fact that we are just entering into the digital age?
Yes we did. At the end of the day what is important is the kind of newsroom manager that you are able to attract because there are fantastic talents and people who are looking for opportunities. You must be ready to train and retrain them and mentor. There is no way you can grow skill beyond mentoring and training. I don’t know any other way. We were able to attract and pay our reporters and our news room manager because what we want to do fundamentally is to do good journalism. It is not to use media for political or business thing. So whatever resources we have, we really have to put it in journalism.
How do you compete with other online news media with the likes of Sahara Reporter, The Punch, The Nation and now that we have The Cable?
What we call online market is wide variegated landscape; it’s a landscape that is defined both in terms of quality and diverse kind of character. A lot of what people call online newspapers are just mere aggregators. They have no newsroom. All they need is one computer and capacity for insomnia, not to sleep and willingness to steal content from other people.
There are those who can enter good relationship with you, use your content, and acknowledge it properly but a lot of what is happening is that they just raid your content. As far as I know, I know The Scoop has a modest news room, The Cable has and we have a newsroom operation and match any regular newspaper in the country. We have 20 reporters, senior editors. We are fundamentally online news content provider.