The media is dead, long live the media

On the morning of June 8, 1998, I listened to a BBC World Service report that claimed that Sani Abacha, Nigeria's leader at the time had passed away during the wee hours. After the report, I had my bath, had breakfast, and being a UNIBEN student at the time, went for my lectures. In school, life went on as usual, no one paid much attention to the BBC report, although evidently not a few of us had heard it. At the close of lectures that day, Radio Nigeria confirmed what the BBC had told us hours earlier, and the whole of UNIBEN broke out in spontaneous celebrations.

The twelve hour time-lag between the actual event, and people receiving confirmation is simply not possible anymore.

On the evening of Wednesday, 5 May, 2010, I left the NEXT offices in the company of Yinka Oyeligbe, one of the senior editors. He dropped me off at the beginning of my street twenty three minutes later and we bid each other a pleasant night's rest.

I then took the walk down to my house, turned on the generator and took a shower. Just as I was preparing to go and turn off the generator, my phone rang. It was a friend from Abuja, and he wanted to let me know that President Yar'Adua was dead. Now this particular fellow usually comes good, so I knew immediately that I was in for a long night. Almost as soon as we finished speaking, the phone rang again. This time, it was Henry Okelue, (@4eyedmonk on Twitter). He had just picked the same story off of Twitter, and called the first newsman that he knew, me, to confirm. Apparently, ThisDay had also put it up on their website as breaking news.

Immediately I swung into action, called Atom Lim, one of the Copy Desk members who was on duty and informed him. Then I called Terfa Tilley-Gyado, our Abuja Desk head. He was already on the way to Aso Rock. By the time I was leaving the house ten minutes later, MTN had smiled to the bank with about N600 of my hard earned money.

It was very difficult finding a cab to take me back to the NEXT offices by that time of night, but eventually I did find one. Like the others, I showed him my ID card, then told him what happened, and why it was imperative that I got to Oregun as quickly as possible. While opening the door for me, he muttered that "Yar'Adua has died many times before so what is the big deal about this one?" I struggled to convince him that this time the man had really died.

Thirty minutes after I got into that cab, I was at the office. My colleagues had already put up the story, and we already had 98 comments. On Twitter, our alert had been retweeted 252 times, and the Facebook status update had over 500 redirects to 234NEXT.com. Another website famous for breaking the news quickly, Sahara Reporters, had crashed, obviously due to a higher volume of traffic than their servers could handle. We used to have that problem in the earlier days.

I had one of the staff on duty flip through the channels on DSTv, and to my disappointment only Al-Jazeera had taken the story up. Channels TV was continuing with regular programming, but had a little banner indicating that this had happened, otherwise they continued with regular programming. The BBC (who had inadvertently helped in the attempt to discredit NEXT months ago) were talking about the British general elections. AIT had the news on their scrolling marquee, CNN had nothing (so much for being the first to know). NTA, Nigeria's official state broadcaster was, well, it was showing something so irrelevant that I almost flipped!

Anyway, after that initial excitement, it was down to managing the deluge of comments that were coming into the website, getting as much information as we could, verifying the information, posting the live updates to 234NEXT.com and Twitter, as well as making sure that the website did not crash.

By morning, the entire country knew what had happened, and the public holiday which was declared by the new President was also common knowledge. It is significant to note that students who were meant to take their school leaving examinations were also informed that the exams would go ahead as scheduled, and things did not miss a beat. People were able to find out information, double-check, cross-check, then pass on the information very quickly. How did they do this?

The tools that enabled all of this information to spread so rapidly are collectively called new media.

New media is a term that attempts to describe the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies starting at the end of the 20th century. Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, interactive and impartial. Examples include the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, computer games, DVDs and the almost ubiquitous mobile phone. New media does not include television programmes, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications. However, in recent times, a lot of Western television stations are attempting to latch on to, and integrate new media in their programming.

Websites such as Twitter and Facebook have turned out to be especially effective at propagating stories, and the Yar'Adua story was no exception.

At NEXT, we are committed to making use of new media and have become Nigeria's leader in the use of such. Our Facebook page is constantly updated, same as our Twitter account. One of the nicer moments on Twitter came when Stella Damasus (via Twitter) observed that "u know when NEXT has come becos tweets start coming".

As a staff here at NEXT, my proudest achievement till date was the ground breaking exclusive when we let the world know that our former President (God rest his soul) was not coming back. Being that the story was exclusive, we released only a small portion of it in the morning. When we let out the full story, the reaction was immediate. Twitter went mad, as well as Facebook, not to talk of 234NEXT.com. A lot of people called us liars, but as time went on and we were proved right, our followership on both mediums (Facebook and Twitter), which had suffered slightly, especially after the fake interview granted to the BBC, began to grow almost exponentially. On the day Mr. Yar'Adua was brought back to Nigeria, we peaked at almost a hundred thousand individuals from around the world coming to 234NEXT.com that day, and somehow, despite our challenges, we have managed to maintain figures close to that.

All this is coming at a time when newspaper circulation figures worldwide are dropping. What does that tell us? The future is in new media. The Media is dead, long live the Media.

P.S: my favourite tweet ever was from Amara Nwankpa (@bubusn on Twitter), "about d Yardy thing. @234next was right afterall #lightupnigeria #enoughisenough."