@ SIXTEEN We balanced the national media landscape with Daily Trust — MA’AJI
Tell us a little about your experience at Media Trust?
I was the first business and economy editor of the Daily Trust. I began my journalism career as a senior correspondent in Lagos for Weekly Trust. A year later I was called to Abuja to assume that editorial position when the idea of creating Daily Trust was conceived.
Can you tell us how you started to build up the business desk at and the challenges you faced at that time?
Daily Trust
Let me tell you the philosophy or the idea behind the creation of Daily Trust. You know that Weekly Trust had been in existence for close to three years when the idea of Daily Trust came up. It was conceived by the management of Media Trust Limited as a way of creating a new platform for factual news because the concern, as at that time, was that there was heavy editorial leaning of the dominant Lagos press towards a particular political ideology or ethnicity, regional or religious outlook. We saw that as an opportunity to straighten up the media landscape to a more professional trajectory. It was also an opportunity to make our footprints in the larger mainstream environment rather than the existing weekly tabloid alone as well as present news coming out of the northern parts of the country from our own perspective rather than living at the mercy of those to whom sensationalism has become an addiction.
The challenge then, and it is still the same now, is that you will see a headline that will identify criminality or personal conduct of individuals along religious or ethnic lines or to associate the policies of government and mischievously tie them to a particular tribe or religion to which the subject belongs to or identifies with – and in the process pass judgment on entire groups, on the pages of newspapers, on an issue the majority knew next to nothing about. That is a dangerous trend for any country. And the status quo was not exactly favoring the North, which had not a single daily newspaper from the region.
What made it even worse was that the nation was just emerging from its most horrid political nightmare – June 12.
So, the idea was to create a medium that will give everybody a level playing field and present facts as they were, without mixing up the opinions of the reporters or the correspondents with the events or the issues at hand. It was a compelling motivation.
The good thing was that we were young professionals. We were mostly below 30. There was myself, there was Professor Farooq Kperogi, the news editor, and then there was Ibrahim Modibbo, who was the political editor. Then, there was Ismaila Lere, who was the editor for sports and I was there as the business and economy editor. The only middle aged person was Jubrin Daudu (of blessed memory) who was the editor and then there was Ona Idu who was the production editor and Hajiya Aisha Umar Yusuf, the features editor and others too numerous to mention. Most of us were professionals from the north, young at heart, who were tired of the status quo, who wanted to bring change to the media landscape.
On the business desk, the hard working Ahmed Shakarau was my main correspondent in Abuja. He later succeeded me. We relied heavily on Media Trust’s network of correspondents that were spread across Nigeria. We were responsible for planning the pages, assembling the news from different correspondents. At the same time we were equally reporters because we had to gather the news from Abuja. We attended functions, wrote stories and features, conducted interviews and transcribed copies, proof-read, edited… we did everything. You just can’t sit in the office and say you are Mr. editor. We were in the trenches, in the thick of the battle.
Farooq was always gathering the news and segmenting them across the various desks and furiously editing while Jubrin Daudu was always looking out to grab anyone within strangling distance and squash them for being sluggish. I didn’t like his overly aggressive style though. So we never really got on very well. He was a new kind of boss from the really nice, easy going and brotherly Aliu Akoshile whom I left back in Lagos. The newsroom was a non-stop action arena from morning up to 1:00am when you needed to be sure that your pages had gone to bed and the first copies have started rolling off the press.
We had no printing press. Everything was outsourced to Heritage press. We were always on the neck of the typesetters and the lithographers; where is my page? Have you done it? And then Clement and Abdulrauf were always there working like their lives depended on how fast they typed on the keyboards.
Alhaji Kabiru Yusuf, the Managing Director at that time, was always motivating and cheerful. The condition of service wasn’t exactly perfect as should be expected in any start-up. Business was very difficult yet the motivation and excitement were there.
The first masthead was rendered in bright red colours. Then on the 6th or 7th edition, I think, Heritage Press made an error. The masthead appeared in purple instead of the usual red. It was a shock. We thought Malam Kabiru and Jubrin Daudu would join hands to strangle Onah Idu, the production editor. Well, they didn’t. Everyone liked the new colour that had just been discovered in error. So we decided to keep it that way going forward. Thinking about it now, I believe that was probably one of the most exciting periods of my life. So that’s how it all began – amidst bedlam (general laughter).
How where you able to survive the competition in the industry as at that time considering that you were new in the industry?
I want to mention two things. There was underestimation and condescension. There was this perception that we were not up to the task. On our part, however, we had a lot of confidence. We knew we would make come what may. Our lives, virtually depended on it. We knew that the competition were mere human beings like us the rest of and it was not as if they knew the job better than we did or that they acquired better education than we did. The issue was the perception that this was one of those new newspapers out of the north that will eventually fizzle out. But we proved them wrong.
Was there any advert department or marketing at that time or reporters also act as advert officers?
Actually, there were advert executives, and they were under a lot of pressure. For the sustainability of the company, you have to get adverts, Newspaper publishing is a business, so you have to be profitable or at least capable of breaking even because the cover price is truly less than the printing cost of a newspaper. People invested and you can’t continue to operate at a loss for long and remain open. It is a private enterprise. So all hands were on deck in terms of promoting the business. Editorial staff did a lot of marketing too. Unlike advert executives, we weren’t given financial targets to meet but instead were encouraged with incentives to go the extra mile. We were all part of the same team, in the same building frankly.
One of the major challenges was brand recognition. We had not yet built brand equity then because Daily Trust was a relatively new publication, drawing its goodwill largely from Weekly Trust which had been in existence for a couple of years and had built a modest name for itself. But serious advertisers wanted a platform that was seriously mainstream and available on a daily basis with a serious niche that will capture their market segments up North.
For example, you will go marketing to a company trying to get adverts and supplementary placements and you will be told which newspaper you said you are from again? You’ll then need to invoke the Weekly Trust name before they get the hint. Sometimes, our publishers themselves, which comprises of people who were in the private sector, had to intervene. Our management team, led by Malam Kabiru Yusuf have a lot of networking capacity. We also rode on their personal reputations to convince advertisers that we are new but rapidly building our circulation.
The argument from advertisers was that, we can’t give you adverts when you don’t have circulation. And building the circulation was indeed a challenge, because at that time we were printing at a commercial press in Abuja only and the printing usually ends around 3:00am. We had no press of our own anywhere. So we needed to make sure that the newspaper reached its destination before 9:30 am across all 36 states everyday, otherwise people in those destinations would have bought other newspapers. There was no gsm and online publication was in its infancy.
Not everybody has enough disposable income to buy more than one newspaper a day. I remember when I was in Lagos, it was Weekly Trust then, you know weeklies have longer shelf life that lasts for six days, unlike dailies.
Aliyu Ma’aji (Ma’ajin Zazzau) was the pioneer Business & Economy Editor of the Daily Trust newspaper. He started working in Media Trust as a senior correspondent in Lagos for the Weekly Trust.
At that time, there was this perception that newspapers published in the North hardly survive. Then came and changed that narrative. Why do you think people thought that way?
Daily Trust
That credit goes to the management of Media Trust Limited, the publishers. Daily Trust was established by veteran journalists, academics and entrepreneurs. I think too that experience from Weekly Trust played a part in ensuring that graduation from a weekly to a daily kept challenges as manageable level or at least helped everyone to develop the thick skin necessary to survive, come what may. The management was able to build a business rather than just a news outlet.
How would you express your feelings now that the paper is still growing stronger, winning prestigious awards and how do you see its future?
I was actually expecting it even much earlier, because you can’t spend the last 15 years turning out quality news far from what most of the Nigerian newspapers produce, and
failed to be recognized or your impact on the media landscape felt profoundly. You see, what set Daily Trust apart from the onset up to today, is that sensationalism is never part of the editorial style of the newspaper. Just because we want to sell the newspaper, we are not going to cast headlines in order to compel you into buying junk. When readers continue to find complete disconnect between the headline and the body of the story, your integrity is compromised. We never did that. And just because you are in government or powerful position, you cannot just enter our news room and get your bidding done. The tradition stands till today.
At the same time, there was the industry-wide phenomenon of collecting brown envelops, or ‘qua’, as sleazy journalists call it. We knew from the start that you can’t eliminate or eradicate unwholesome behavior in any profession. What Daily Trust did was to discourage such practices by keeping a tight lid on editorial content, ensuring that no unbalanced news got published and correspondents found wanting were severely dealt with. The newspaper periodically sacrifices a whole page to create awareness as well by saying look, we pay our journalists competitive salaries, we discourage newsmakers from tempting them with gratifications. Daily Trust does not bury its head in the sand. What the paper does is to clearly indicate that it is doing its own part in protecting and preserving the ethics of the profession. And it expects those in authority, public or private sector, to help us protect professional etiquette too.
Daily Trust has been driven by self-regulation from inception. Willingness on the part of the management to take every action necessary to reduce unwholesome conduct among its employees and at the same time having humility to protect their reader and the general public from fabricated or skewed news content made all the difference. That was a complete departure from the norm. At some point in this Nigeria some newspapers were telling their staff ‘if you have our ID card you don’t need a salary’, - just to tell you how some publishers were complicit in the corruption.
From the start, we knew we didn’t have all the answers but we were determined to do our own bit and we communicated to our readers and stakeholders that we expect them to help us in building a medium that was ethically driven to deliver objective news that wasn’t compromised by nauseating influences. So should it now surprise anyone that a publication built on such sustainable foundations is today waxing stronger?