The management of three online media organisations, Premium Times, TheCable and Dateline Nigeria have announced new appointments and promotion of their staff.
Kola Olapoju will take over from Taiwo George as editor of TheCable from February 1. George has resigned his appointment for a yet to be disclosed new appointment in another media organisation.
Two former editors of Daily Trust, Nasiru Abubakar and Lawan Danjuma Adamu, have also been named as Editor in Chief and General Editor respectively of Dateline Nigeria based in Abuja, while Premium Times announced the creation of new desks, promotion and reassignment of some staff.
Olapoju, a former editor of YNaija.com, who holds a degree in business administration from the Lagos State University (LASU), joined TheCable in 2016 as deputy editor and led the birth of TheCable Lifestyle — a sub-domain of the newspaper.
He left in 2019 for Opera News where he was senior editor/team lead till 2020.
Founder and CEO of TheCable, Simon Kolawole said Olapoju’s talent and experience are critical to the next stage of TheCable’s development plan.
“KP was unanimously picked by the recruitment panel. His basket of skills is quite impressive. In addition to his knowledge of politics, arts, business, entertainment and sport, he is a digital journalist who understands what it takes to compete in the extremely tough online market,” he said.
Olapoju said it’s an honour to be considered worthy of leading the crop of talented journalists at TheCable, Nigeria’s leading online newspaper and promised to inspire the team to achieve great feats.
Fateema B. Bello, who launched the Dateline Nigeria in November 2019 said in a statement that Abubakar and Adamu will help to actualise and strengthen the news platform’s goals of providing deep investigative stories, factual and balanced reports and in-depth analyses to its readers.
Abubakar, who resigned as managing editor from Daily Trust last September was editor of Daily Trust (2014-2019), deputy editor, and Weekly Trust editor.
He studied Mass Communication at the Kaduna Polytechnic and Bayero University, Kano and was in 2016 named by the Nigeria Media Merit Awards (NMMA) as Editor of the Year, while Daily Trust emerged Newspaper of the Year.
Adamu resigned in August 2020 as the pioneer weekend editor overseeing both weekend Titles – Daily Trust on Saturday and Daily Trust on Sunday.
In an internal memo to staff on Friday, January 8, the Editor in Chief of Premium Times, Mr Muskilu Mojeed announced the creation of the National News Desk, which will coordinate political, education and security/law enforcement coverage to be headed by General Editor, Festus Owete.
Another new desk, Human Rights, Judiciary & Anti-Corruption Desk will be headed by Ade Adesomoju, a veteran judiciary reporter who recently joined the organisation from PUNCH newspaper.
Mojeed expressed the confidence that Mr Adesomoju, a microbiology graduate from the Obafemi Awolowo University, will deploy his wealth of experience to deliver huge reportorial and editing values to the organisation.
Other appointments and redeployments include Ini Ekott, deputy managing editor, who has been given additional responsibility as Head of the Business/Economy Desk, while Bisi Abidoye, an assistant managing editor (AME) and former head of the Standards Desk is now the AME in charge of Mentorship, In-depth Coverages and Special Projects.
Tosin Omoniyi, a senior assistant editor, will replace Mr Abidoye as the new head of the Standards Desk, Ben Ezeamalu, an assistant managing editor, is now Head of Lagos/South-West Operations and Cletus Ukpong, assistant managing editor, who was assistant editor for the South-South region.
