Charles Onyango-Obbo
On March 19 and 20, the Nation Media Group and the Africa Media Initiative will hold easily the most high profile African media conference ever witnessed on this fair continent (http://panafricamedia2010kenya.com).
The conference will be one of the events to mark Nation Media Group’s 50th anniversary.
What interests us is the conference theme: “Media And The Africa Promise: Reflections On The Past, Present, And Prospects For The Future”. How will the media in Kenya, or the wider Africa, look like by 2020?
One place to begin finding answers is the Internet edition of the Daily Nation (www.nation.co.ke). The Nation website is the most read news and current affairs site in eastern Africa, and when I last checked, the seventh highest ranked in that category in Africa.
The first six are all South African, so that makes it the most read site north of the Limpopo. For that reason, it tells us a lot about readers’ attitudes.
Since January 1, the most read story, by far, on Daily Nation online has been “Here is News of My Life: Arunga”, about the romantic and family struggles of the former KTN news anchor Esther Arunga, and her relationship with jazz musician Joseph Hellon’s marvellously Finger of God church.
The second biggest story of the year so far: “Is This Esther’s Hell on Earth?”
President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga squeezed into third place with “Kibaki Raila Clash Over Cabinet Purge”.
Arunga took back fourth place with “TV presenter leaves family to join church””. In fifth place was “Saudi throws Kenyan maid out of top floor window”. Arunga was in action again in sixth place, with “Esther Arunga picture gallery”.
Seventh was “Marriage on the rocks as young educated wives wear the pants”.
Kibaki and Raila fought back, with “What if Raila walks out of the alliance?” in eighth, and “Is it possible Kibaki is setting Raila up?” in ninth.
The business of top newspapers and TV stations in Kenya is the “serious news” about what President Kibaki and PM Raila do and say, Parliament, the Constitution, and so forth. But clearly these stories are not as attractive to the millions of readers of one of Africa’s top news sites as the private torments of a catchy former TV presenter.
To make matters worse, we mainstream media are not particularly good at telling the story of ordinary people like Arunga.
THE PICTURE LOOKS BLEAK IF YOU consider which are the five least read sections of the Nation website. The most unpopular, if you may call it that, is the stocks and foreign exchange rates. Then, to my utter distress, the Opinion pages and the Editorial — which are considered the heart and soul of a newspaper. Then, finally, sports.
It is not difficult to see why these areas perform poorly. Most people get their sports news via TV, radio, mobile phone, and the Internet. By the time it appears in the paper 24 hours later, it’s not worth much.
People are no longer terribly interested in what we talking heads and commentators have to say because, with FM radio, blogs, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, there is now a wide array of opinions out there.
Most are fresher and devoid of the partisanship of mainstream media. With the proliferation that we shall see soon of digital TV channels, and high speed ubiquitous Internet, even FM stations will also become irrelevant.
So as the people who were raised on reading hard copies of newspapers and sitting in front of TVs retire and die off, we shall all become history.
Kenya, in particular, is a deadly place for old school journalism. Recent data by Opera Mini (the chaps who make the popular mobile phone browser by the same name) showed that mobile Internet in Africa is growing at supersonic speed.
In Libya, in a year it grew by nearly 6,000 per cent. Nigeria, nearly 3,000 per cent. Kenya almost 600 per cent.
But the devil is in the details. Kenya is now Africa’s leading digital technology adaptor. Kenyans read more on the Internet than S. Africans, Nigerians, Egyptians and (here it gets interesting) Italians, Britons, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and Spaniards do! In other words, they are among the world leaders.
In less than 10 years, for those of us journalists who make a living writing in newspapers about Kenya’s Grand Coalition government feuds and the likely effect of an Al-Shabaab victory in Somalia, unless we embrace the many new media technology trends yet to come, we shall have no alternative but to retire to the villages to raise goats and grow yams.
-Daily Nation
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