BEING A KEYNOTE
ADDRESS BY TAIWO OBE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE NIGERIAN JOURNALIST INTERNET RIGHTS INITIATIVE
(NJIRI) AT THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS CENTRE, OGBA, LAGOS, NIGERIA, ON WEDNESDAY,
2 MAY 2018.
It is a privilege and honour
to be here today among friends and colleagues to present this keynote address.
I am grateful to the International Press Centre (IPC), Lagos, for the kind
consideration.
I want to believe that I was accorded
this honour because of some of our contributions toward making Nigerian
journalists digital-compliant.
In February 2014, under the
aegis of the EverythingJournalism Group which I created on LinkedIn, and The
Journalism Clinic, my outfit, which vision is to raise the next generation of
first-rate journalists, I convened, first in Lagos, the Summit on Functional Social Networking for Nigerian Journalists,
with the kind sponsorship of the UBA Group. We had variations of this summit in
Abuja and Port-Harcourt. Tive Denedo, a former colleague at The Guardian, helped to capture the
essence of the summit: “to engage,
discuss and hold a conversation about the convergence of traditional and social
media and how the experience and years of deployment of the former can help
design a pathway of value for the latter.”
But, when I want to be down to
earth, I say that our journalists are still waiting for buses at a bus stop
which had been physically removed, and buses no longer stopped there.
I had observed that, while
others were taking advantage of the ubiquitous smartphone and access to the
internet to reach out to vast audiences, journalists were content to remain
stuck in the “traditional media” web while whining over inconsequential such as
how bloggers were “desecrating the profession.” Whatever that meant.
The fact was that, right
before our eyes, media consumption habits were changing but what did we care? People
no longer waited till the following morning to read the news. With the social
media, news became like instant noodles; to be consumed, as it happened, sizzling
hot and fresh, and digested through engaging conversations. When one-ime Nigerian Vice President Atiku
Abubakar joined Twitter, he noted that “social media is where young people, the
bulk of Nigeria’s population, gather to share their thoughts, often venting
their frustrations with the inefficiencies of the country.” But did we listen?
At that summit, my plea was
simple: “…we should begin to think less of whether we are a print or electronic
medium, but more of creating content that will attract and engage audiences on
all devices that technology has spurned.”
In the version of the summit which
we held at Abuja, tagged The Capital
Edition, I had asked Olusegun Adeniyi, the ThisDay editorial board chairman, to speak on “Why I am a digital
alien” because I knew he was absent from the social media. He accepted my
challenge. In his presentation, believe it, he allowed that the social media
“had become a potent tool in the age of information,” yet he had two reasons
for staying away. Permit me to quote him, extensively: “There are two reasons
why I am out. The first one is general while the second is specific. As to the
general one, it all started from a realisation that I was spending considerable
time reading and replying emails and text messages. So, I saw no point in
further complicating my life. I have always believed that if anybody needed to
reach me, he would get my email (which is readily available for readers of
THISDAY newspaper) and send me a direct mail to which I would reply, and I am
very good at that.
Now to the specific: I saw
very early the pitfalls in engaging people you may not even know in virtual
discussions.
As far back as year 2001,
because my email address was on my Backpage column in THISDAY, I began to receive several group mails. There was hardly
any listserv cobbled together by Nigerians of my generation that would not include
my email address. And even when I rarely participated in their discussions, I
followed most of their threads….But right from year 2001, I saw the danger in
virtual friendship from what transpired on some of these listserv. Many of
these internet friends would begin by eulogising one another, just on account
of some posts on which they agree until a day when someone writes something
they do not agree with. The disagreement could even begin in an innocent manner
but one word out of turn and it would degenerate into serious verbal wars and
hate speeches, sometimes even threats of violence.
It was about this time that
Facebook was launched and then the Paris Hilton of this world started telling
us what they ate for breakfast, where they went in the afternoon and who they
were sleeping with at night. And I asked myself: why should that be my
business. I saw what people were doing on Facebook, and I decided I was not
going to join. And I never did.
For sure, the social media is
good and because of the pressure from several friends, I have been tempted to
join Twitter. I have been considering the offer in the last six months and will
decide one way or the another before the end of the year….”
Mr Adeniyi spoke on 25 June
2014. He didn’t join Twitter by the end of that year as he had hoped, but he
did in 2015, on 27 April. He, however, didn’t post his first tweet until 29
April, to a warm welcome from his adherents, many of whom wondered why it took
him so long to join the platform. He didn’t respond to any of the comments. I
had asked him, what eventually triggered his joining Twitter. His response was
that he convinced himself that it would “enhance” his job. Would his appearance
on 1 May 2015, on The Platform, a yearly knowledge-sharing programme by a new
generation church to discuss national issues, have been the final straw?
Anyhow, with at least 23,600 followers on Twitter, there is no doubt that he had
for long denied himself a veritable platform for social conversations on his
writings but also to expand his readership in multiples of thousands. “I am
enjoying it all,” he told me when I asked him how he now felt. He joined
Facebook on that same 29 April 2015, but that was it; no activity since then.
Let’s stay a bit more on
Twitter, where so many people around the world now hanout for breaking news.
Once upon a time, all you
could tweet was 140-character long. Then Twitter doubled the space. Now, you
can compose ad infinitum in what is more commonly as the Thread. This was
introduced by Twitter on 12 December 2017. Twitter has now made it easy to thread
by adding a plus sign at the bottom right of the window where you compose a
tweet, and you can add frames upon frames until you are through with your
essay. My dear friends, you can now “publish” your own newspaper or whatever
you want on that platform.
I don’t know how many here
have heard of, or follow, Seth Abramson. For the uninitiated, he is an
attorney, trained as a criminal investigator, tenure-track professor of
Communication Arts and Sciences at the University of New Hampshire, USA, and
since the coming of Donald Trump, a regular commentator/analyst on CNN and BBC.
His Twitter handle is like a village square. He is a master of threads. On The
Journalism Clinic page on Facebook, I highlighted a 17 February thread he did
on Yulya Alferova – ex-wife of Russian oligarch Artem Klyushin and a member of
Trump’s entourage in Moscow in 2013. That thread comprises 20 frames including
images in almost all of them. The last time I checked, that thread had 3,591
Retweets and 6,192 Likes. That, in one word, is engagement. The interesting
part of Abramson’s TL is the Donate button. “Being an independent journalist,”
he notes, “is a time-consuming work, however, I don’t use Patreon or any other
formal donation platform, so I appreciate it more than I can say when readers
enjoy what I write enough to want to contribute to my research and writing. Any
amount is welcome; knowing my work has value to its audience helps keep me
going. So, if you enjoy my contributions on Twitter and other sites and would
like to see more of them, please click the PayPal link below. PayPal is quick,
easy and 100% secure. My sincere thanks for your generosity!” If you have not
yet experienced the storm that Abramson’s threads generate, I will urge you to
spare a little time to check it out. Many swear by it: one commenter posted on
one of his recent threads, #InSethWeTrust. Abramson says of his Twitter feed:
“(It) is what’s called ‘metajournalism’ – a metamodern form of post-internet
digital journalism that acknowledges that we all have too much information to
process daily. Instead of despairing, however, metajournalism tries to find a
way to see and use all available
information to make better
journalism. How does matajournalism do this? By seeing and using the entire
field of information on a given subject - say the Trump-Russia investigation –
whether the information comes from the United States or elsewhere, from media
outlets or digital outlets, from a verified Twitter account or a New York Times article from a decade
ago. The idea is that, as long as all of the information that is seen by the metajournalist is accurate,
it can be used to reconstruct false
narratives into accurate ones.”
Back home, I will recommend
you check out the Twitter feed of Nairametrics which proclaims itself as “the
most reliable source for information online. Creating wealth through
information.” It is not an empty boast. But, why I am highlighting it here is
for its regularly Pinned Tweet - Corporate New Roundup, which is a Thread of
significant business and economy news of the week, with a sprinkle of insights
and informed commentary. It is a Sponsored thread. Know-how pays, particularly
when there is also a captive audience. Nairametrics has 14.7k followers.
I am going to round off with a
quote from one of a few informed commentators I respect and follow: Simbo
Olorunfemi. He dominates the Facebook space with his well-researched posts –
talk about know-how again. In a post on 29 April titled “Not Too Young To
Thrive” he stated: “…the internet is a massive gift, a major game-changer. Use
it. Maximise It.”
Perhaps Hal Varian, the
founding dean of the School of Information at the University of Berkely,
California, puts it better, even if it has a plug-in for Google (where he is
chief economist): “The Internet makes information available. Google makes
information accessible.”
Have know-how. Have access to
the internet. Have power.
OBE,
Commonwealth Profession Fellow and Fellow of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, is
founder/director of The Journalism Clinic.
TL:
@araisokun/@Clinic4Journos
Journalists worldwide can apply for a grant. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is accepting project proposals for data-driven journalism projects related to land rights and property rights. 
