Business Daily (Nairobi)
George Ogola
26 May 2008
Nairobi — These are interesting and frightening times for the news media. It is a sector being radically transformed from within and without by new and emerging technologies. These, depending on how one looks at them can either provide new opportunities for media organisations or lead to their demise.
With the exception of a few countries, newspaper circulations have been falling consistently over the past couple of years as audiences migrate online. As broadband technology is rolled out in various parts of the world, more tectonic shifts in readership patterns are still likely to be witnessed. How the news media meet this challenge will ultimately define the media's character and existence in future.
It is now widely agreeable that most newspapers 'die' after 1 p.m. In Kenya, the shelf-life of a newspaper is still slightly longer, but there is every indication that it is growing shorter by the day.
When the Kenyan newspaper shelf-life finally settles at 1 p.m, which it will, are our local news media organisations going to survive the challenge?
Despite the boundless potential the online media platform avail businesses and audiences, the speed at which it is being embraced by Kenyan news media organisations seems rather desultory.
Perhaps it is the false comfort in the brand name. However, loyalty to brand name can never be infinite considering that people's expectations are always in flux.
Many media houses with far more venerable profiles have had to embrace the online media platform. Initially looked at as a threat, they are now exploiting this platform as an opportunity.
The New York Times and the Guardian Newspapers (UK) provide interesting case studies. Today, both newspapers get more page impressions online than they sell print copies. Similarly, their online revenues are now much higher as ad spend equally migrates online.
Last year, for example, conservative estimates put the New York Times page impressions online at over 13 million while the print circulation just passed the 1 million mark on weekdays and attracted approximately 1.6 million readers over the weekend.
The Guardian's daily circulation was slightly more than 300,000 while its online version, Guardian Unlimited, attracted on average 830,361 unique visitors every day and more than 16 million readers a month!
Other newspapers based in the UK including the Daily Mail, The Times, and the Observer share the same trend with online readers dwarfing print readers. The situation is getting even more challenging for print circulation with freesheets now posting higher circulation figures.
It is noteworthy, however, that most online readers of the UK press tend to be based outside the country. Even then, these figures provide a compelling need to rethink old business models and to begin to vigorously embrace new technologies.
The mainstream Kenyan press appears aware yet still apprehensive about the online media platform. A casual look at our mainstream news media online hints at this apprehension, at worst they betray a feeling that we are stuck in a rut.
Kenyan news websites sometimes make sore viewing and reading, precisely because they appear interested in merely making sure they have an online presence, not establishing that presence.
It is more like having a bed but one which is unmade. Often times, basic news outlines are posted with hardly any links to secondary stories. It is not uncommon to find incomplete news articles posted or wrongly dated, headlines with flawed grammar while pictures are routinely given wrong captions.
The archives often don't work and attempting to get back copies as recently as last week on some websites is virtually impossible.
More significantly, these websites go live after midnight and are hardly ever updated during the day. The logic of the net is the very fact that it allows for immediacy.
When this is ignored, it becomes just another platform. Indeed, to go live at midnight with 'breaking news' beats the logic of actually being online. Similarly, bar the nationmedia.com, the concept of a multimedia platform remains completely ignored by other news organisations.
Powerful audiences
Only nationmedia.com carries a few video clips but that is as far it goes. The element of interactivity, the very essence of 'experiencing' news online remains unexploited.
Kenyan newspapers still tend to rely entirely on letters to the editor for feedback. Indeed, it would have been laughable were it not so serious that there are no more than 10 Kenyan journalists with live blogs. Journalists need to acknowledge that the relationship between audiences and news organisations has been altered over the last few years.
Audiences are today not passive recipients of news. The top-down approach that has traditionally defined this relationship does not work anymore. Indeed, today, audiences are very much a part of editorial decision making and they do not occupy a position in which they are to be patronised in the relationship.
Perhaps Kenyan journalists need to ask themselves how much they know about their audiences. Who reads them and why? We have to realise that we are now dealing with a readership that is savvy in many ways; it is decidedly discriminative, exceedingly fractured and also very powerful.
The opportunities that new media technologies offer the Kenyan news media are unlimited and to refuse to exploit them would be regrettable. At a time when we have a roll-out of broadband technology as well as large diasporic community that contributes billions of shillings to the Kenyan economy every year, it makes professional and commercial sense to revamp the Kenyan media presence online.
Clearly, such migration has its challenges but rather than later reflect on what could have been, we should instead confront the present and prepare for future possibilities.
Of course the technology will never replace hard-nosed journalism. Indeed, the technology is only as good as what it mediates. But to insist on the traditional model of journalism is to sleepwalk towards a future of irrelevance.
Dr Ogola teaches at the University of Central Lancashire.
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