What happened to the news magzines?
Come, ye sons and daughters of Trust newspapers, let us reason together. What is happened or is happening to the newsmagazine sub-sector of the print media in our country? Do you remember the last time you bought a newsmagazine from a vendor in any of our towns and cities? I cannot remember and neither can you. The truth is that the newsmagazine have had their days of fame and fortune and seemed to have died or are dying unmourned.
This is a major disaster in both the print and the electronic media. It is even worse that the news media commissioned a major study to fish out the worms eating them up. Newswatch blazed the trail in the newsmagazine sub-sector of the industry. As soon as it debuted, quite a good number of the similar publications - Africa Concord, African Guardian, ThisWeek, Tell - to name just a few, followed.
Individually and collectively, these publications redefined journalism in our country. They did what the newspapers could not do: they confronted the regime with the truth. They showed courage and pluck see nowhere else in Africa. They fought the military and some of them, such as Newswatch, paid a stiff price. But they savoured the sweet victory in the end. They outlasted the military regimes that gave them wahala.
The eighties and nineties were the golden years of Nigerian courageous and robust journalism in our country. This owed essentially to the role played by the newsmagazines and their brand of journalism. That era certainly will not return. Eras do not return but each era teaches vital lessons worth holding on to because human life and success are a series of lessons. Have we picked up any lessons about the blight that systematically ate up our newsmagazines?
Perhaps, this is the time to go in search of that blight - not for the sake of the dead or dying magazines but for the sake of our print media industry. I think it is glib to look at the fate of these magazines and conclude that what happened to them was nobody’s fault. The circumstances and the market forces passed an unfavourable judgment on them and they went the way of all businesses that found no favour with the presiding market forces with a reputation for showing no mercy. Its dictum is: make right decisions and you survive; other wise, so be it.
Should we accept that as the one and only reason for the fate that befell the newsmagazines? Easy cop out I suppose. Market forces are strong and bring disaster on companies and their products but they also help to point industries and products in the right at various periods in an era. Advertises know this. They help to companies repackage their products and promote old products in new, redesigned packages.
Did the newsmagazines fail to hear what the market forces were telling them? Let me give the sons and daughters some hints. Newspapers and newsmagazines are driven by demographic interest A younger generation has interests far different from those of the generation it succeeded. If a newsmagazine sticks to what worked for it in the past, it is courting trouble. It is the business of the newsmagazine to search for the changing taste look in the generation it is serving. All publications serve particular demographic interests. No newsmagazine should forget that.
If refuse to look into what wrong, then certainly the blight will eat its way back into the system in the future and a newsmagazine publisher would be left hold the short end of the stick. I know this is a major investigative assignment. I do not throw it at the editors lightly. I do so in the hope that as they sink their teeth into it, they will enrich informed conversation about our news media - the good, the bad and the ugly.