My years as Daily Trust editor
In June 2007, a year after I joined the staff of Media Trust Limited as Managing Editor/Deputy Chairman of the Editorial Board, I was redeployed as Editor, When the CEO/ Editor-in-Chief Malam Kabiru Yusuf told me of the redeployment [on the staircase], I was ambivalent. That was because as Managing Editor I was not involved with editorial production, which is the most tedious aspect of journalism. I closed from work at 6pm and painted the town red.
Daily Trust.
My hesitation however evaporated when I received the letter of redeployment. It was accompanied by triple promotion from Senior Manager to General Manager; I leapfrogged over AGM and DGM. That promotion reminded me of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward of the 1950s. Even as Senior Manager my salary was four times what I earned as Editor of New Nigerian and as GM, the pay doubled again.
By the time I became its editor, Daily Trust was already the leading newspaper in Northern Nigeria and one of the leading ones in the country. My task was to take it to a higher level. I was not new to the editor’s chair, having previously edited three publications. I was editor of The Sentinel in 1995; was editor of New Nigerian Weekly in 19982000 and was editor of New Nigerian in 2000-06. In between, I was also Assistant Editor of Citizen in 1990-94, Deputy Editor of The Sentinel in 1994-95 and Deputy Editor of New Nigerian in 199698. I also chaired New Nigerian’s Group Editorial Board for seven years.
The staffers that I inherited at Daily Trust were on the whole quite good. However, compared to Citizen, there were few highly experienced journalists to look up to. Unlike in New Nigerian, Daily Trust’s Newsroom did not have old traditions. In fact there was no proper Production Desk, only a Copy Desk with poorly defined functions headed by an overzealous white man. The organisation was however very dynamic. Every reporter had a laptop, tape recorder and camera. Editorial trips were well financed and training sessions were frequent. There were almost no labour issues because salaries and allowances were good and were paid promptly without any fuss.
The job of a newspaper editor in Nigeria is not necessarily what it is in other countries. I had visited the offices of some American newspaper editors and I found many of them to be sipping coffee and making strategic news decisions. Ideally, the editor’s job should be strategic planning, staff management and direction as well as bringing his rich experience to bear in news gathering, story selection and story rewrite. To that extent there should be a lot of time for reading and reflection but this is difficult when the editor is deeply involved with production chores.
Editing a national newspaper in Nigeria is not a piece of cake. For me, there was the added difficulty that I maintained the Monday back page column, ghost wrote stories and feature articles and also wrote some editorials, in addition to the endless stream of visitors and attending to other management functions. There was the constant worry not to miss stories and not to make mistakes. The management and the board of directors tend to get very upset whenever a mistake is made. The commonest mistakes are typos, wrong names of people and places but the most embarrassing are mistakes of fact and figures, mix ups in photo captions, replication of stories on different pages, headline mistakes especially on Page One and worst of all, libel. My biggest embarrassment occurred when City News page inadvertently revealed the name of a rape victim.
Readers relish pointing out mistakes to editors. Anytime there is a mistake, phones will ring early in the morning and readers will sanctimoniously draw your attention to an error. I tried to minimise this problem by rewriting all lead stories myself and also reading as many pages as possible before they were sent to pre-press. Tiredness and fatigue are an editor’s dangerous enemies. Since I resumed work around 11am in order to read the newspapers before the 12 noon editorial meeting, chances are that fatigue sets in before sunset, which is when most pages come for vetting and is the time when an editor needs to be most alert. An editor could look at a page at 10pm and not see an error, only to instantly see it the following morning, by which time the newspaper is already out on the streets.
I think the most memorable events of my editorial tenure were the Daily Trust special editions. We did three consecutive special editions on President Umaru Yar’adua’s death, his funeral and Goodluck Jonathan’s rise to the presidency. We did another when Namadi Sambo became Vice President; another one when Prof Jega was appointed INEC Chairman, which caused a lot of excitement at the time; one special edition in October 2010 on Nigeria at 50; and we did six special editions for the 2011 general elections, before and after each of the three polls. In August 2011 we also did a special edition on Northern Nigeria.
When President Yar’adua’s health became very precarious in early 2010, I secretly made a plan. I borrowed the idea from a TIME magazine bumper edition in 1982 on Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s death, which the publisher admitted was written five years earlier. One day in April 2010, I had finished the paper and was driving into my house at about 11pm when I received confirmation that Yar’adua had died. I called the Production Editor and told him to yank off the first ten pages of the paper. I grabbed a mug of coffee and rushed back to the office.
One by one I called the deputy editor Habeeb Pindiga; State House reporter Abdulfatah Olajide; op-ed editor Ibrahim Auduson; politics editor Sulaiman Bisalla; features editor Dafe Ujorha and the News Editor Abdullahi Idris. Each one of them said he was at home. “Do you have a laptop and internet service?” They all said yes. So I gave each one of them a specific topic to write a 1,000 word article: Yar’adua’s legacy, Jonathan’s rise, Turai Yar’adua, sudden power shift etc. I took two topics for myself and by the time I finished writing them, my colleagues had began e-mailing their articles. We had already done a dummy; so I took each article, edited it and sent it to Nii Ayi Bulley to place on the assigned page. By 4am we were done. When I stepped out of the office, I saw nearly 100 vendors at the gate, jostling to get copies of what they knew would be a hot cake.
We did something of the sort in November 2008 when Barack Obama was elected US President. We sat down in the Newsroom all night and watched the returns on CNN. I had already written the story and only dotted the i’s at 5am when CNN called California for Obama. We decided that a headline saying Obama had won was not enough because many readers would have sat up all night and seen the tally so we instead had a large front page photo of Obama with the banner headline, “Great victory! Amazing history!”
In November 2011 I was replaced as editor and promoted to Deputy Editorin-Chief. The period coincided with the uproar in the Judiciary over President of the Court of Appeal Justice Isa Ayo Salami’s promotion to the Supreme Court. Three managers came to my office when they heard of the changes. I said to them, “It is like Salami’s promotion!”