The Business of News
“The modern journalist is required to know a little about many things, more than a little, in fact, enough to make sense of most issues … well-educated, invariably a university graduate, a good thinker, a man with a way with words, able to hold his own against the arrogant newsmaker.”
Man bites dog, a student of journalism is tempted to answer a teacher who asks him to define news. It is a textbook definition that many an unsuspecting journalism student gives to a question that he needs one hour to answer. Of course, that’s the way it was in those days when journalists were men and women who found themselves in the business of news for want of better things to do, having failed in practically everything else. He was half literate, phenomenon that a lady with a wry sense of homour characterizes as worse than being totally illiterate. In the United States, journalist of the old was known with his hat and swagger stick and foul-smelling cigar stuck in his face. He couldn’t go out to cover any story, he depended entirely on hand-outs and permanent contacts. He was also that way in Europe. In Nigeria, he wore shabby clothes and dirty shoes. He went from court room to court room, picked up the proverbial envelopes to augment his sorry income. Usually, he couldn’t get his sentences right. All this was a habit not easily shaken off. And as the modern journalist arrived on the scene, the old man felt threatened. For the new ones were younger, urbane and extremely well-educated, able to hold their own against the most arrogant newsmakers who regarded journalists as boys who never grew up.
It was all a reflection of new life and new world, in which most people were moving up in education and career, asking for more information, not just information in the sense of the man biting the dog, but more explication of the information being handed out. That called for people better trained, people with the sort of minds to sift information, to pick the useful and discard the useless and find the lie carefully tucked masses of details. The modern journalist is required to know a little about many things, more than a little, in fact, enough to make sense of most issues such that he doesn’t appear stupid. He is invariably a university graduate, a good thinker and a man with a way with words. But he is not a philanthropist. He does whatever he does to make money, for he has chosen a career in which he wants to spend his life, in which he wants newsmakers to respect him. He wants to dress well and he wants to live in a good house and drive car. This calls for money. And, so increasingly, he asks for more money and more perquisites. He also wants a good office and he likes to read his articles well printed on good paper from a good rotary machine. Money, money.
So, when a newspaper says it wants to increase its cover prize and increase its advertisement charges, it is doing so to be able to make journalism a worthwhile endeavour, to make it possible for journalism to provide adequate coverage of the many intricate issues of today. A sword, it must be recognised, cuts two ways. News is a perishable good which usually become useless in less than 24 hours. The flashy new journalist will not be worth his Russell and Bromley shoes and his Givenchy suits if nobody can afford to read him. For God’s sake, the whole thing is supposed to be for mass circulation. Therefore, to ask 25 kobo for a copy of newspaper is going just a little too far. The argument has been made that the cost of producing a newspaper is high, too high, if you ask me. The journalist is expensive. Newsprint is prohibitive. Ink, power and other materials are skyrocketing in prices that one needs a military binocular to glimpse what they read. But to put 25 kobo on a newspaper is to defeat the purpose for which a newspaper is put out, to circulate as widely as possible. The Nigerian newspaper reader buys at least two papers daily and on Sunday, one published by his state government and the other, a national newspaper usually published by private investors. Others who choose to buy three can even pick up their five kobo change from their 50 kobo note. But at 25 kobo, most Nigerians will not even want to stop and pick one paper. “If news is going to cost more than garri,” he will say to himself, “I will add that 25 kobo to my garri money.” And that will be really sad.
Nigeria is a growing country, despite everything Nigerians are doing to hold the country down, and one thing a country growing and espousing democracy needs is proliferation of differing views in as many outlets as the country can stomach. The Nigerian who is angry, too angry, to spend 25 kobo on newspaper may well have been priced out of information. It’s not like the United States where he can turn angrily to his radio for the hourly news in which he is sure to catch all the essence of the happenings of the day, or the television for the event of network news to view that’s important enough in a second or two on the tube. Nigerian television and radio are nothing to write home about since it appears increasingly that those who manage the Nigerian electronic news don’t know what they are doing. Both the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria(FRCN), for some strange reasons, refused to report the Kano riots in which the city was devastated. For two days, both networks said nothing about those riots as print journalists waited attentively to hear of developments on the rioting. Nigerians had to scramble their radio sets to get the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Voice of America (VOA) to learn about what was happening just behind their closed windows.
The irony in the 25 kobo price is that those who could afford the money don’t usually pay for papers. Their offices supply them a copy each of all the papers in the country which are laid on their office coffee tables hours before they get to work. Those who have to buy the papers are those now suffering from the Sunmonu-induced inflation, those who can’t afford meat and opt for iced fish or “Geisha.” They, more than other Nigerians, need to have the newspapers because it serves as their main source of news. Even those who may want to watch news on their tubes can’t afford the tubes, and if they can, they may not get reception in their remote locations. What one had expected the Newspaper Proprietors Association to have done was to increase the cover price to 20 kobo – as they have now done after the government twisted their hands – and then fight vigorously to get government’s approval for advertisement increases. Those Nigerians who spend more money bewailing the death of a relative who, when alive couldn’t afford three square meals a day, will still buy the one-page obituary, even if the price is 200 percent of the going rate. On the heels of stiff advertisement rates increase, the NPAN Could have lobbied the government unceasingly to remove all duties from commodities that are used producing a newspaper. That’s what the NPAN could have done instead of pricing itself out of the market. Come to think of it this way, some newspapers may just die because of the increases, and both government and readers will be equally worse off for it.
©Sunday Concord, August 16, 1981
(Pp.134-137)
