Media organisations in the country have been urged to improve their contents to focus more on what is happening among people rather than merely always report governments’ policies and programs.
The chairman of Media Trust Limited, publishers of Daily Trust and other titles, Malam Kabiru Yusuf, made the call on Thursday at the 16th All Nigerian Editors Conference which was held virtually in Abuja.
Yusuf also urged the media to embrace the new technology and invest more of their talents in it to compete with the current trends of journalism.
He said the media was losing people not because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but for the fact that their contents were not qualitative enough to address the needs of the readers.
“As you can see now, the media is losing people, not because of COVID-19 but because of contents. During the coverage of the pandemic, the media focuses more of its attention on nicely setting up conference halls and meeting ministers to give details of what is happening.
“We don’t do reporting on what people are going through; rather, we focus our attention on what the government is saying. We also focus on official pronouncements, not what is actually happening among people, and that is why we are losing them,” he said.
He urged the media to be good content creators and report happenings affecting people and their societies.
Earlier in his address, the keynote speaker, Taiwo Obe, said media contents should resonate with what people want in order to get them back and retain the present ones.
Obe said people would continue to avoid media contents until it focused its attention on people and society.
President, Nigerian Union of Journalists, Chris Isiguzo, spoke about the challenges facing the media sustainability in Nigeria and the globe.
Isiguzo said the effects of COVID-19 had touched the media and posed a great challenge to revenue generation, thereby leading to loss of jobs.
“Media sustainability is now a global challenge not only in Nigeria. Many organisations have suffered low revenue generation and number of staff have reduced as a result of COVID-19 pandemic,” he said.
He stressed the need to explore more strategic plans to sustain the media and also improve content creation for more revenue generation and service to society.
The event, attended by various media stakeholders across the country, featured question and comment sessions.
