The global in the local
Edward Felsenthal , the chief executive of Time Magazine, in a significant welcome message to the new proprietors of the famous weekly, spoke about “ the extraordinary speed of disruption in [the] industry”.( Time Magazine, October 1, 2018). A few weeks later, it was the turn of The Guardian of London.
After a typically sober piece on Nigeria, the iconic mouthpiece of Leftist intelligentsia, in a classic enactment of jeremiad journalism, resorted to its now familiar plaintive plea for monetary assistance from its readers.( The Guardian, December, 2018) It was not fake news by any stretch of the imagination.
The impact of new technology on newspaper production and the changing global pattern of consumption of news have led to a radical shift of fortunes for the news media. Perhaps we are at the threshold of another Copernican revolution in the way and manner the human race assimilates and disseminates information.
Yet despite its dire and uncertain future, the news about the imminent death of the newspaper industry worldwide now appears to be grossly exaggerated. In the past decade and a half, grim obituaries of the press have appeared in advanced nations with alarming regularity. ( Williams, 1988, 2005, 2011) In-house pundits predict it, just as sympathetic undertakers prepare for the concluding rites.
Sophisticated media surveys and scholarly studies seem to have reached a damning verdict about the viability of the contemporary press as currently structured, its sustainability as a long term economic project and the possibility of survival in a rapidly globalizing world fraught with uncertainties. A recent study concluded rather glumly that the print media was not about to die but about to commit suicide
Yet like the mythical phoenix, a bird with a remarkable capacity for self-regeneration, the Nigerian print media, like the global press, has also shown an impressive flair for ceaseless self-transformation and a surprising capacity to reinvent itself where and when it matters most.
However, it must be admitted that the situation is more like a re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus. Newspaper houses that cannot adapt to changing circumstances must wither and die. Many have done so accordingly.
It is therefore not surprising that despite its ability to fend off decline and death, a deathly haze surrounds most newspaper houses the world over. Morale has never been lower. Precipitate fall in fortune and summary demise never seem to be far away. Tell-tale signs of malaise abound.
In America, the efforts by their concerned owners to separate insolvent print media from the more buoyant electronic media has been described as resembling a busy divorce court with so many suits going on at the same time.
How are the mighty fallen indeed! As we noted earlier, the once mighty Guardian newspaper of London occasionally begs its own readers for financial subvention to stave off closure while the Evening Standard counterpart gives out free copies just to boost circulation even as The Independent, the doyen of donnish respectability, is spending its last moments in the intensive care unit.
In a feat of malevolent clairvoyance, Roland “Tiny” Rowland, famously ordered that the proceeds of a successful libel suit against Private Eye, the London satirical magazine, be allocated to funding research into “diseased organs”. On its own, poker-faced and without batting an eyelid, Private eye often appeals to its readers to contribute generously to offsetting the fruits of its libellous labour.
It is truly the age of diseased organs of mass communication. Contemporary newspaper houses are no doubt distressed and rattled by adversity. But respect for analytical clarity and the specific internal logic that drives each manifestation of the crisis demand that we must contextualize and put things in proper geo-political perspective.
The international picture painted in the preceding paragraphs is to help us gain a local perspective of a subsisting crisis of the print media in the era of globalizing capitalism. To this end, our overriding aim in this survey is to beam a searchlight on the Nigerian dimension of this crisis and proffer suggestions for a restorative paradigm shift.
The Nigerian print
media in critical view
While the crisis of print communication is no doubt a global one, its most severe manifestation can be found in The Third World, particularly in Nigeria and many other African countries, where endemic political instability combines with the economic ravages of globalization and local mismanagement to produce a unique form of mass poverty and the total evisceration of the middle class.
The fate of the press can always be linked to the fate of the middle classes and the increasing differentiation of taste and the choices forced upon them by the means of production as they impact on the mode of consumption. In any human society, the mode of production always determines the pattern of consumption with each nation finding its level in the median.
It is indeed useful to recall at this point that the modern press is a product of the Industrial Revolution which began in England in the mid-seventeenth century and rapidly spread to other parts of Europe. The seismic shift in the ownership of the means of production led to the consolidation of a new class—the middle class— and a dramatic rise in literacy, the advent of leisure which is a sine qua non for an exponential increase in the reading culture and the rise of the newspaper industry as the most potent mode of mass communication.
Four hundred years after this “bourgeois” revolution which completely reworked the political and economic map of the ancient world as we knew it, a new type of revolution appears to be the underway. But this time around, in a great irony of history, it is the old middle class or salaried aristocrats and their print media which appear to be its principal casualties.
The rampaging momentum of the forces of globalization, with their virtual abolition of time and space, their enhanced ability to move capital and labour across the globe, the switch to new technologies of production and the radical restructuring of the old capitalist categories, have led to unprecedented prosperity on a scale that the human race could only have dreamt of five hundred years ago. But it has also bred a huge disparity between the very rich and the very poor leading to a new global multi-racial underclass.
Yet as it was the case during the Industrial Revolution which led directly to the internationalization of slavery, Africa appears to have been worse hit again in the Age of Globalization. As a result of its weak and delinquent political institutions and inability to modernize its jaded economic structure, globalization has led to accelerating poverty, suffering on a biblical scale and the flight of human capital from the continent. The old middle-class which was a product of the decolonization project has all but disappeared.
Perhaps further contextualization will aid the historical perspective. Unlike the old generation of pre-independence journalists and pen-pushers of antiquity, the contemporary Nigerian journalist is far better educated and better exposed. Gone have been the days when journalism in Nigeria was regarded as the dead-end of deadwood or what Awolowo famously called “ the flotsam and jetsam of the Nigerian society”.(Awolowo, 1948)
The visionary Graduate Policy of Alhaji Babatunde Jose at the Times group and the return of American-trained professionals in the late seventies coupled with the advent of New Journalism as pioneered by the recently deceased Tom Wolfe brought prestige and glamour to Nigerian journalism. The typical top-flight Nigerian editor began to see himself as a power broker in rivalry with the dominant fraction of the ruling caste.
Unfortunately as history would have it, the period also coincided with the advent of a new breed of sophisticated and war-hardened military rulers who did not believe that you can purchase power parity with cultural or economic power for that matter. The ensuing collision of altars brought harsh reality back. As the military class project of perpetual domination opened and deepened, most journalists settled for co-optation rather than confrontation. It is better to be compromised than to be consigned to the cemetery.
Unlike the founding fathers of Nigerian journalism who fought colonial rule to a standstill with the sheer ferocity of their pen and a section of the press which waged a hit and run warfare against military despotism, the current global crisis of journalism has left the typical Nigerian journalist with no appetite for heroism or visionary grandstanding.
The impact of this crisis on the Nigerian print media can therefore be better imagined. Ravaged by dwindling sales, seemingly hostile new technology, poor public perception, miserable remuneration, low self-esteem, opinion-rigging and the commodification of news dissemination, the contemporary Nigerian print media is in dire straits indeed.
The newsmagazine segment appears to be worst hit. At the moment, there is no truly national weekly newsmagazine worthy of the name in circulation in Nigeria. The great magazines of the mid-seventies up till the late eighties, Newbreed, The Week, Newswatch, African Concord and African Guardian which contributed immensely to the cultural and intellectual renaissance briefly enjoyed by the nation have gone into oblivion. The News has become a monthly while Tell periodically surfaces in the newspaper stand.
The only exception is Africa Today owned by the veteran journalist, Kayode Soyinka, which is packaged and published from London and has shown unusual resilience and a remarkable capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Perhaps it should also be mentioned that an online version of The News operates fitfully and is hobbled by adverse circumstances.
With their capacity to break and develop news suborned by the advent of social media, the magazines lost the prime source of vitality and relevance. For a moment, they relied on a cast of pundits and informed commentators to see them through, but the rise of bloggers and ersatz columnists operating from the safety of the internet and without any claim to objectivity and fidelity to the truth seem to have scuppered their claim to distinction.
Since nature abhors a vacuum, everybody with access to a laptop and the internet has become a columnist. Bloggers thrive where angels fear to tread and the democratization of journalism has opened the door to a brave new world of Kamikaze commentators operating like jungle snipers. The web, with its dense and impenetrable cyber-foliage, lurks with journalistic assassins, equal opportunity terminators and blackmailers tormenting their victims at will.
Yet it has not always been like this. At the height of its glory in the mid-seventies, the Sunday Times of Nigeria sold half a million copies. In the early nineties, the special interest Weekend Concord edited by the duo of Mike Awoyinfa and Dimgba Igwe hovered around the same figures. Today, the two papers have been rested and the combined daily sales of newspapers in the country cannot approach the two hundred thousand bench mark.
With the worsening exchange rate of the naira as a result of corruption, mismanagement and disastrous economic policies, the cost of newspaper production has become prohibitive. It should be recalled that between the mid-seventies and the early nineties when the Nigerian print media was at the zenith of its glory, the naira competed favourably with other currencies. But disastrous economic policies of succeeding regimes opened the gate to Armageddon.
As a result, there is no single functioning paper mill in the country at the moment and all the critical components of news production have to be imported. The once vibrant newsprint mills of Iwopin and Oku Iboku have been allowed to collapse as a result of government neglect and penchant for misplaced priorities.
But far more ominous for the newspaper industry in Nigeria and the Third World was the recent decision of the Chinese authorities to ban importation of newsprint grade of pulp while virtually shutting down all their newsprint plants. Consequently, China now forages for her huge consumption of newsprint in the global market like everyone else.
While this is a hardnosed strategic drive to protect her economy, the impact on the newsprint market has been catastrophic, driving the price of high grade newsprint to $940/MT in a matter of days. Because of an already depressed industry, newspaper proprietors may be reluctant to pass on the cost to the consumers immediately. But needless to add that in the long run, somebody will have to pay for this steep rise in production cost.
Nigeria’s new generation of billionaire publishers are unlikely to pick the tab for long even if consideration for political survival compels them to do so for now. They have shown that they are not in this business for charity purpose. Indeed it can be argued that the rise of billionaire publishers, or what can be called the Nigerian equivalent of Russian oligarchs, has not stemmed the tide of steady decline of the print media in Nigeria.
One reason for this is the fact that publishing oligarchs are not the same thing as the old press barons; the one is into publishing often as a result of political calculations and economic self-protection while the other was there with a genuine passion to grow the industry irrespective of immediate impact on fortunes.
But such are the imponderable complexities of human history that the ultimate social spin-off of a particular political project may be at variance from the base political motivation of its initiator. While not reversing the fortunes of the Nigeria press, the advent of oligarchs has helped the Nigerian press to stave off certain death by injecting new titles into the system.
In a sense, then, the rise of billionaire publishers throws an interesting searchlight on Nigerian’s economic and political trajectory as well as the evolutionary pattern of press ownership and consumption.
In the mid-seventies, the Chairman of the Times publishing group, Alhaji Babatunde Jose, had stoutly resisted the attempts by his bosom friend, the billionaire magnate, Henry Fajemirokun, to take over the company on the grounds that it was too politically risky to vest the controlling power of such a powerful institution in an individual (Jose, 1987; Fajemirokun 2018).
But shortly after the military coup of 1975, the federal authorities, acting through the then Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, General Olusegun Obasanjo, compulsorily acquired majority shares in the Times’ publishing group. However after almost three decades, the federal government, under President Obasanjo, sold off the business as a virtual scrap to a shadowy group of ruthless asset strippers. The same fate was later to overtake the iconic Newswatch magazine.
By the time it was sold, the once vibrant and dynamic Times newspaper group had become a poor shadow of its former self, hobbled by internal mismanagement as well as by fierce competition from emergent, independently owned newspapers which gave it a run for its money.
A decade and a half after this historic climb down by the federal authorities, the Daily Times publishes fitfully and without any pretence whatsoever to regularity of appearance until recently. This is in sharp contrast with family-owned newspaper outfits such as the Ibadan-based Tribune titles which have been in continuous existence since 1949; The Lagos-based Punch since 1979; The Guardian since 1983; The Vanguard since 1985.
It should be stated by way of further exploring the dynamics of newspaper ownership in post-colonial Nigeria that of all the newspapers mentioned, only the Tribune titles started out with an explicitly political and cultural mission. The publisher of the Concord group did not survive his detour into politics while the founding publisher of The Guardian barely survived an assassination attempt after he decided to opt out of a brief excursion into politics.
What is to be done?
So, where do we go from here? There is no point in crying over spilled milk. The external factors militating against the sustainability and continued viability of the print media in Nigeria cannot be redressed by internal rectification alone. Until purchasing parity is restored to the vaporized middle classes and lower class wannabes, reader consumption will continue to nosedive.
For example, due to the great Welfarist project embarked upon by western countries after the Second World War which was fallout of the America-inspired Marshall Plan, it is not unusual to happen upon a subway tramp on a cold morning in London clutching a copy of his favourite daily tabloid. In contemporary Nigeria, it would amount to an impossible anomaly to find a paid worker holding a copy of a current newspaper.
The worsening decline in the purchasing power of the average Nigerian over the decades has led to deadening of the demand stimuli in the newspaper industry. Whereas in the sixties leading up to the early seventies the average middle class family could afford its choice foreign magazine either through direct purchase or drastically subsidized subscription, that market has practically evaporated.
For their daily fare of news, many people simply tune in to radio stations and television programmes or troop to the open readership of what is known as the “ Peoples’ Parliament”, a typically Nigerian euphemism for free consumption of information at the newsstand. In the process, the solitary communion mandatory for proper digest of issues is lost.
The net result of all this has been a massive de-education of the populace, a critical shortfall in social consciousness and a drastic decline in civil enlightenment which bode ill for the democratic project as well as public awareness. In any society where this happens, there is a steady regression into the Hobbesian state of nature which induces Stone Age pathologies such we are witnessing on a daily basis.
While many of our media analysts are focused on the phenomenon of a “captured press”, it has not occurred to them, going by the preceding analysis, that this might be a mere symptom of a more devastating ailment. In a captured society, the press itself cannot escape captivity.
The virtual disappearance of the once vibrant Nigeria middle class is the major factor aiding the virtual collapse of the Nigerian newspaper industry. While internal disequilibrium can be rectified, external ailments require massive social re-engineering through purposeful governance. This is beyond the scope of this survey.
In any sane society, the middle class remains the great stabilising buffer between the very rich and the very poor, the stabilising rock of social values; the realm of possible and tempering dreams of redemption. When successful societies talk of inclusive growth, it is not about producing a few rogue billionaires but massive social engineering which lifts as many as possible from the hellhole of abysmal poverty and immiseration to the safety net of middle class existence.
Where the middle class disappears as a result of malign governance, the press itself begins to resemble the malign state it is supposed to capture and interrogate: reeking of corruption, impunity and malfeasance of the highest order. As it has been noted, in such circumstances, the Fourth Estate of the realm becomes the Fourth Realm of the estate. (Williams, 2011)
Toward a paradigm shift
From the preceding analysis, one can conclude that in order to stave off death and possible extinction, there is an urgent need to deepen and expand the revenue base of the Nigerian print media. There is no need to reinvent the wheel where it already exists. Some of the measures proposed here are already being put into practice both within and outside the country. What remains is to refine and finesse them to suit local circumstances.
The print media need to enhance their revenue base through multiple sources of income. This often requires thinking out of the box or wading into unfamiliar and unconventional territory. Print media can diversify into real estate or invest in blue chips companies in times of buoyancy. This allows profits from other sectors to be parlayed and leveraged to ailing and underperforming sectors.
At the height of its glory, the property portfolio of the Times Group was enough to sustain the newspaper industry in the entire country. The future newspaper conglomerate will boast of an estate section, a commodities trade department, probably a food chain and a full blown, semi-independent IT segment which is capable of breaking new grounds in news dissemination.
As painful as this may sound, the newspaper industry is not a charity organization. Deadwood and surplus staff must be weeded out in order to enhance remuneration. But to minimize the impact, those amenable to dynamic multi-tasking can be retrained and retooled before deployment to areas of critical shortage.
As the case is at the moment, there are simply too many redundant staff loitering about in newspaper houses. A sizable number of them are simply beyond redeployment. When this is not the case, experience has shown that ghost workers and deliberate inflation of the wage bill abound.
This is a case of double jeopardy in which failure of IT and modern technology reinforces failure in other departments. A simple modular software programming would have captured current staff and greatly reduced the possibility of wage bill inflation. Once everybody knows that this ruthless technology is in place, it serves as a deterrent and disincentive to the criminal-minded.
Special events and photo-ups must be paid for upfront, so must reportage of weddings, funerals and vanity adverts particularly by politicians. The tendency has been for state governments to rush in adverts at the last moment in order to renege on payment schedule. In a climate of political volatility in which succeeding administrations find it difficult to honour the obligation of previous administrations even where they belong to the same party, this subsequently becomes a bad debt.
The current fitful and half-hearted online presence of most Nigerian newspapers must be jettisoned for a more hands-on and enterprising approach. Whether we admire the internet or not, it has come to stay with us, and there is nothing anybody can do about that. The online staff of our newspapers needs to be boosted.
Breaking news must be immediately displayed online in order to boost traffic which is imperative for internet circulation. Partnership with Google, Facebook etc must be encouraged and sustained in order to boost foreign currency earning which has become critical to sustained viability and even survival.
Necessity is often said to be the mother of invention. In a feat of visionary and proactive thinking, some Nigerian newspapers have cottoned on to special publications within publications which cater for special interests. In this respect, The Nation’s sporting newsletter has become a runaway success boosting the circulation figures of the daily in a tremendous manner.
So has the Style pull-out of This Day and its legal forum. These now need to be deepened and broadened to include subjects like Culture, Literature, Automobile, Boxing, Fashion, Travels, Betting etc. The prospects of overseas grants to newspapers in developing countries must also be explored. But this should not be expected without some conditionality attached. In all likelihood, success will depend on the international perception of the newspaper as a bastion of democracy and development.
Finally, whether we like the opinions or not, whether we disagree with their informed commentary or agree with it, punditry still matters a lot when it comes to the fate of newspapers. Star columnists must be cultivated and well remunerated. The newspaper has been famously described as the nation talking to itself.
A lot of this national dialogue is refracted and redacted as the case may be through the opinions of star writers. In developed nations, it is not unusual to find a single columnist being better paid than the editor of the paper. This is even more critical in developing countries where weak institutions confer on leading commentators the status of secular sages and magi. To this end, international syndication and consumption of great articles, features and columns must be explored.
If there is any major lesson to be learnt from this survey, it is that in developing countries, state ownership of newspaper titles has been a major social, economic and political disaster. It is a flagrant assault on democracy and separation of power. In almost sixty years of independence, all the state-sponsored newspapers in Nigeria have died an inglorious death. It is another avenue for waste, mismanagement of resources and corruption. This is not the way to go. With the needed reforms in place, the print industry in Nigeria will bounce back.
©Tacitus, 2018.
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