Simon Ateba, publisher of SimonAtebaNews on Simonateba.com challenges journalists to embrace the future and position themselves for the incoming opportunities offered by the new media.
You see, you all know my story. Most of you read late last year how I was arrested at the Minawao camp in Cameroon’s far north while trying to investigate the living conditions of about 50, 000 Nigerian refugees who had fled the Boko Haram atrocities in Nigeria’s northeast.
You all read how I was detained in a cell for three agonising nights and day and accused of being a spy for Boko Haram, the world’s deadliest terrorists who have killed about 25, 000 innocent Nigerians since 2009, and more than 1200 Cameroonians, including 67 soldiers there since 2013, as well as hundreds of people in Niger and Chad in the past few years.
They have also displaced about 2.5 million people in the Lake Chad Basin and sent at least 500, 000 children out of school, including the still missing Chibok girls who were awfully abducted in their school dormitory in April 2014.
You see, just mentioning Boko Haram right now is so annoying as the terrorists continue to model their barbarism after the Middle East killers, and feel good when they wreak havoc and spill as much blood as they can.
But the great news about my arrest, apart from drawing attention to Nigerian refugees in Cameroon, was the role played by the social media. As I once told British online newspaper, IBTimes, and the BBC, I sincerely believe that it was social media outrage that led to my prompt release.
A Nigerian journalist, Ahmed Abba, arrested a month before my detention who works for Radio France International, is still being detained as you read this on 18 February 2016, almost seven months after he was arrested and accused of being a Boko Haram informant.
That brings me to the importance of the new media and why it’s the future we must all accept and not resist, which is why I am writing this short rambling.
As the publisher of SimonAtebaNews onsimonateba.com, I sincerely believe that newspapers have long died and as someone put it recently, their collective burial took place a long time ago, with little notice from the media industry, still stuck in the past, unwilling to embrace the future and discard their old defeated ways.
Newspapers died for several reasons; first because the Internet provided free of charge articles for everyone who had access to the Internet to read, and secondly because online newspapers like SimonAtebaNews began providing alternative in terms of real ideas, original contents and on-the-go breaking news.
Things people are to read in the newspapers the next day are all published the same day. The same statement from the Presidency The Punch and other newspapers were exclusively receiving before was the same sent to SimonAtebaNews, and it was being published five minutes after.
With the advent of the social media such as Facebook, Twitter and the rest, news was now coming to the people.
You see, you may be on Facebook reading other things when someone suddenly shares a breaking news. All you need is to click on the link and you’re reading the article without any hassle.
The thing is, you’re reading the news of now, now! You’re reading news as event unfold without waiting for the next day newspapers and without even going to the websites directly. Newspapers now bring those articles to you free of any charge via the social media.
And with many old fashion newspapers just repeating yesterday’s stories, people got tired and stopped buying them, knowing they could read the same articles faster online a day earlier.
As a result, publishers began to owe their staff months of wages. As at today, many newspaper houses have not paid their staff for many months. Many of them are going out of business, especially because advertisers have begun to realise that the readers have moved online and they are seriously considering moving their products and services online where the people are.
That’s where we are right now. Once the advertisers fully move online, the money moves online and newspapers will almost be over.
This is why it is so important to embrace the future and position yourself for the incoming opportunities. Motivational speaker, Lesbrown, likes to say that it is better to be prepared and not have an opportunity, than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.
The old media industry is dead and the new one is rising and we better rise with it and look up instead of looking back hoping the dead will rise again.
Many people are familiar with some of the things I have highlighted here, but many journalists do not think they can take the bold step.
Many journalists are afraid of starting something new, getting new digital skills, trying new things and adapting to the new reality. They believe they cannot build a website, and publish their own articles. They dismiss themselves by saying that no one will take them seriously. They feel they are not good enough or worthy enough. They prefer to work for someone until they retire or are sacked.
To those ones, I would like to say that “if I can, then you can”.
In case you don’t know, I was born in the French speaking part of Cameroon and only learnt English in Lagos in 2003 and 2004 before going back to campus in 2005. I spent six and half years there until I completed a postgraduate diploma in public relations and advertising, after years studying mass communication.
Yes you can. I had to learn the culture. I had to read the entire political history of Nigeria, from independence to the civil war, to after the war, followed by military coups, the return of democracy with Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and now the return of Buhari 30 years after he was overthrown.
I also had to learn everything digital on the Internet and right now I can build websites, add my plugins, and add every function that I need.
Believe me, as someone who worked for TheNews Magazine and P.M.NEWS for eight years, it’s a long shot doing all the digital things that I am doing now after all the time I spent in the newsroom doing the regular things every print person does.
I do not know everything yet. I keep learning every day. But I have made tremendous progress, from learning English language, to learning mass communication and now mastering the digital world and publishing SimonAtebaNews on Simonateba.com. It’s a long shot.
If I could do all these things in the past ten years, how much more for people who were born here 30 or 40 years ago! If I can, then you can.
Ateba can be contacted onatebap@gmail.com, @simonateba or+2348060782856.
