How To be a Modern Nigerian Journalist

When I was asked  Tuesday,  to speak on this occasion, the mandate was that  I would speak on ‘How to become a journalist—tips and experience’.

However, upon reflection, I have taken the liberty to add the word ’modern’ to the topic.

The reason is simple: anyone who aspires to be a journalist in this age, must decide whether he wants to be either an analogue practitioner, a throwback to the old, bygone years or a digital journalist, a devotee of the world of new technology, that has greatly shaped our profession and business. In the practical sense, he really has no choice, except to be the latter.

The truth is that the new tech age and its gadgets, the Internet, the i-phones, i-pads and most important, the BlackBerry, have redefined our practice and they will tinker more with it in the next few years, when the forecast is that newspapers and magazines may no longer exist the way we see them today.

We now live in an age, when the news does not have to be printed on newsprint or art paper any more, or broadcast on radio or TV for a restricted audience. It is now available on the go, to a worldwide audience on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter,on blogs, web sites.
Now, the purveyors of news are mostly non- journalists, the new army of ‘citizen journalists’, or those the American journalist, Eric Boehlert, calls the ‘undocumented’’. Though they are untrained in the nuances of our profession, they are eager and able to offer news, in audio, video, photographs instantaneously, making tomorrow’s newspapers and even today’s evening newspapers, stale as they come out of the presses. Check for instance www.saharareporters.com.

We also live in an age, when looking for news sources or connecting with news sources, does not have to involve driving long distances, with all the dangers involved. Things are now made easier by the mobile phone. You can tap your source, by voice or SMS anywhere on the planet—no more miles to log to reach sources. What you need to be cautious about is the money you will burn on your phone. There was a day I tried to get a banker for his side of a story. We had sent reporters to his office; we were told he was not in the country. When I dialed his cell-phone number, we found that he was in China. The distance was not a problem on this day, as the man agreed to speak on the issue.

Another development is the enactment of the FOI Act, which makes it possible to demand for information as a right from government agencies. The Act also compels government and its agencies to supply information. Before the FOI, however, many agencies of government, including the government itself, have registered a huge presence on the web, posting news and information on their activities. Some of them even run e-mail services to their subscribers. The nuggets of information they provide, may not be the type that will interest the journalist, I dare say, they can offer useful news tips.

I will therefore advise those of you who have been recruited to train as journalists, to get familiar with all the new tech and communication gadgets released by Amazon, Google, RIM, Apple and Samsung, LG, Nokia, all those smart phones, the BBs, I-phones, Android, Kindle, i-pad and the Internet. They are the new tools of our profession.
Get familiar with how to use the Internet and its search tools, especially Google. Join the social networks, befriend or
follow as many stars and celebrities as you want, both in Nigeria and abroad. Such linkages will provide news sources as you get down to the business of journalism. Many of the celebrities make news defining announcements on their pages or websites, which will be of value to you.
Just yesterday, Tu Face announced on Twitter, that he would be performing in London O2 Arena on 6 November. It is a tip that can open a bigger story. Sometimes, you need photographs—and you will find that you can easily download them from the sites of the celebrities as we did recently with the story of an Iranian actress, Marzieh Vafamehr, who had been sentenced to a punishment of 90 lashes of the cane. The digital age has made the business of news so easy.

At a recent forum in Lagos, Google, the American search engine and cloud-computing giant, gave statistics and projections about how this new technology has affected publishing, such that in recent years, many newspapers and magazines have migrated from offline, to online. Many more are torn between the two modes. In Nigeria, we have had
TELL’s Broadstreet Journal and NEXT’s daily newspaper, becoming online newspapers.

The Internet age also accounts for the serious decline in newspaper circulation, globally, and how millions of readers have migrated to the net. Google says this drift will be remorseless in the next few years, with more and more people depending on the net for information.
According to Google, the platform for the dependence will be the smart, mobile phones, more than even the desktop or laptop or notebook. In 2015, for example, it is expected that about 2 billion smart phones, cheaper than what we have now, will be in circulation, globally.
In 9 years, mobile connected devices are expected to jump to 10billion, according to The Economist of London, in a recent report.
The implication: fewer and fewer people will read our magazines and newspapers, in the newsprint format.
Many publications will cease publishing on newsprint and opt for electronic publishing on i-pad, Kindle and other gadgets.

I must say however that while the new technology has reshaped the way modern journalism is practiced today, it has not discounted the need for an acolyte to learn the rudiments of the profession. The news still has to be rendered professionally, with all the key ingredients of ‘who, when, where, what, why, how ‘, the 5 Ws and H. If your story or gossip is bereft of these, it is not fit to be printed offline or posted online.

Stories need to be researched and backgrounded. You need some training to know how to do this. It is this training that will assist you to benefit from the rich repertoire of information available on the net. You may want to write a story on an actress or an actor, you will be surprised about the information you will be able to gather by simply writing the name of the subject on the Google search engine. You will not only get earlier stories, you will get photographs or images, video and so on.
The Internet has become a virtual library, with materials available to you on demand.
As a journalist and editor, I have been so much dependent on it such that I cannot remember the last time I entered our newspaper’s library. I only visit when looking for materials published in the 90s.

Training will also equip you with the skills of interviewing people; it will enable you to dig out information about your subject, before putting the mic on his mouth. Many journalists let the profession down when they approach their subjects and ask them stupidly ‘to unveil themselves’ or ‘tell us who you are’.
Why interview someone you do not know? What are you going to ask him? Why allow the subject to lead you on, when you should stamp your authority on the interview?
It is the journalist’s duty to dig out information about these people first, before we interview them. This we can do by searching for their antecedents, online or by asking for information from friends and acquaintances, online and offline. The digital age has increased the frontiers of possibilities. No more excuses for not doing what is right. No more excuses going blank into an interview session and producing scripts that lack ‘value added’.

Training will also burnish your language of expression. As the old philosophers said, language is the most important tool of society. It is also the most important tool of our business as communication media.
Language must be accurate as much as possible. When we use a word, it must connote what we really want to say, so that stories are not misinterpreted.
To underscore the importance of language, I recall one headline that we wrote for a cover story in TEMPO in April 1996, that screamed:” LG Polls:
Abacha shoots Himself In the foot”. The story sold like hot cake, because Abacha haters in Nigeria really wanted the man dead and had bought the paper to read about Abacha’s foolishness. But they scoured the paper in vain. We did not mean what they thought. The headline was coined from an idiomatic expression, which means ‘one making a bad mistake for oneself’.
And the story was about Abacha’s decision to organize local council polls, amidst the internationalized campaign for full democratization in our country;
the story spoke about how the move by the dictator, amounted to another error that would later haunt him. It was a lesson in headlinese. Idioms are to be avoided henceforth by editors unless they connote what the man on the street understands it to be.

Also important to bear in mind as a trainee journalist is the need to constantly seek information and knowledge about all subjects under the sun. Like the computer, the journalist needs a constant knowledge upgrade. We must be thirsty for knowledge. We must seek it wherever possible. We must read books, Google matters of interest even while we play with our phones. Zillions and zillions of information are now available at our fingertips, if we bother to seek them.
And we have to, as Journalism is a knowledge business. We cannot earn the respect of our readers if we publish shallow stories or if all the time, we display crass ignorance in our stories. The readers will only read us for amusement. They will never take us serious.
I am sure; every publisher wants to be taken serious.

I spoke at the beginning about the Google forum in Lagos. Let me share with you the whole panoply of Google tools that their facilitators recommended we start using to fit into the digital age and make our job better. They are Google Search, about which I have spoken, and Google Alert, which enables one to keep tab on one’s beats. For instance, if your beat is Nollywood, the Google Alert can alert you about developments in the beat, as they happen. For instance, I have alerts for Nigeria, P.M News, Tiger Woods, President Jonathan, Bayo Onanuga, etc. These alerts keep me abreast of developments as they affect all the subjects, instantaneously.
Google also recommends its Google News, which can deliver segmented news to your mailbox or Facebook wall. And there is the Google Translate, which gives you instant translations of stories, especially useful if a story about a celebrity comes to you in Spanish or French. There is the Google Baraza, which crowd-sources answers to questions; there are the Google reader, your personal librarian and the Google Analytics, that gives you insight into net trends.

My advice once again: get familiar with all these tools and many more to make a success of your future career as journalists.

Accept my best wishes during your studies.

And thank you for listening.

-A  speech By Bayo Onanuga, editor-in-chief of THENEWS magazine, P.M. NEWS and A.M.Sports at the launch of City People Journalism Institute on Saturday 15 October, 2011.