Breaking the mould of let them pay at XL106.9FM Uyo
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They walked in quietly at the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations Communication Directors Conference at the Ibom Hotel and Golf Resort on October 31. Reporters from a radio station were around to cover the conference. Without invitation and payment? Yes. They also dispatched a four-person crew to cover the annual meeting of the Actors Guild of Nigeria, taking the opening live and interacting with Nollywood’s bests who visited the city.
A return to professionalism is playing out in the beautiful ambience of Uyo, capital of Akwa Ibom State. Less than six months into its opening, XL106.9FM has chosen to walk the path the broadcast media abandoned in Nigeria from 1994.
XLFM does not demand or collect payment for news coverage and broadcast.
The radio station with a heart commenced broadcasting in April 2019. Former Newswatch journalist and ADC Airlines communication guru Utibe Ukim runs the station. Travellers would remember Utibe’s touch with the commercial success of ADC Airline’s in-flight magazine, The Plume. Advertisers queued to feature in the magazine with its rich content of engaging stories and features. It showed that good journalism could be self-sustaining.
XLFM describes itself as Uyo’s premium urban news, music and talk radio. It is one of seven commercial stations serving Akwa Ibom State, with two others as laboratory stations of a university and a polytechnic. Three more stations are on the way.
Managing Director and station promoter Utibe Ukim affirmed, “The word is out. We don’t collect money for press conferences or any coverage. As long as it is news, there is absolutely no cost attached to it. People come to us to say, ‘how much are you collecting. Come and cover our events.’ We do not do so. We decide on what to cover and when based on standard news values and the interest of our listeners. Any day we hear that somebody collected money in the name of our station to cover an event, it will lead to a separation.”
The CEO of XL is not pollyannaish. He sees clearly and is facing the reality of a tight market in a city lacking the commercial vibrancy of Aba, Onitsha, or further afield Lagos or Abuja. He is convinced though that the performance of the station will fetch revenues through advertising and special projects in the best traditions of broadcasting.
It was a pleasant surprise in the city of many surprises. Nigerian broadcasting descended to Let Them Pay beginning 1994 with commercialisation. The Federal Government asked stations to fend for themselves. Someone came up with the idea of Let Them Pay, a slang for saying entities other than the government should pay for news coverage and mention.
I can still recall the night of November 7, 1996, when ADC Airlines Flight 086 went missing and crashed into the swamp at Ejinrin in Epe, with 155 passengers and crew on board. It took more than an hour of pleadings by Chijioke Amu-nnadi, and the intervention of a kind hearted executive for NTA to agree to air the announcement of the missing aircraft. By the way, today marks 23 years of that crash. We pray repose for the souls that departed that day.
The position contradicted the Code of Journalism Practice that the Nigerian Press Organisation re-affirmed in the Ilorin Declaration 1998. Section 7, subsection 2 of the Code states: “To demand payment for the publication of news is inimical to the notion of news as a fair, accurate, unbiased and factual report of an event.”
The private broadcast stations that came on board followed the lead of the public broadcasters and made payment for news coverage and broadcast the norm in Nigerian broadcasting. Stations across the land classified the news and placed charges for political, religious, corporate, educational and social news coverage. They even charge for news commentary, breaching the sacred sanctorum of the editorial opinion of the medium.
Payment for news coverage has caused significant disquiet. It is at the intersection of the debate on funding models versus ethics. It has now led to the phenomenon of the institutional brown envelope, as my ongoing research has shown.
Brown envelope has become almost