Travails of the Print Media

The print media is obviously facing turbulent times with the frequent collapse of magazines and newspapers. Besides being the oldest of the traditional media, it remains the favourite of the masses and is the most easily accessible especially in sub-Saharan Africa where the new media is yet to fully catch on. Joseph Ekeng and Seeni Durojaiye look at the challenges facing the industry in Nigeria.

The newspaper industry in Nigeria is threatened and it does not take much effort to notice this. The stockpile of unsold copies of newspapers and magazines in the circulation departments of print media houses is a clear indication of this problem. It looks like the golden days of the print media, when leading dailies like Daily Times sold as much as 500,000 copies per day, are gone.
The latest figures in an audit conducted by the Advertisers Association of Nigeria (ADVAN) show that all the current newspapers put together do not boast anything close to this number. The cumulative national sales figure from the industry was put at a little over 300,000 copies daily. With sales plummeting and more Nigerians getting access to free news reports from the internet, it seems that the newspaper market is already saturated as some publications drop out after only a few years of hitting the news stands.
Recently, media observers expressed concerns at the frequency of demise of newspapers and magazines in Nigeria.

Revealing Signs of Decline
Not long ago Media24 Publications, one of the biggest media businesses in Africa, made a bold entry into the Nigerian market. The size of the Nigerian population and its passion for entertainment and sports was a huge attraction for the South African company. So it brought in its money and expertise in the hope of dazzling the Nigerian market, seeing this as a sure way of intensifying its hold on the continent.
Notable publications on Media24’s stable included Kick Off and True Love magazines as well as Goal, a sport weekly. It also ran a robust online sports website called www.kickoffnigeria.com. True Love was the flagship brand, a glossy magazine with Nigerian content positioned as the lifestyle handbook for the modern African woman. Reports have it that its South African version commands over 2 million readers. Commenting at the January 2005 launch of True Love West Africa, Patricia Scholtemeyer, former Media24 CEO, emphasized his company’s belief that West Africa offered huge potentials for the team. “Launching True Love is part of Media24’s vision of becoming the leading publisher of printed material in Africa. True Love East Africa has been a great success and we are very optimistic about this new market.”
Kick Off South Africa boasts over 1.6million readers, making it the biggest sports magazine in Africa. The organization naturally expected greater success in Nigeria given the numerical advantage. The publications indeed quickly stood out, thanks to their superior production quality and in-depth and entertaining editorial content. But the song didn’t last long as the magazines were soon confronted with the harsh realities of the print media industry in Nigeria, and after some years, Media24 shut down its operations in Nigeria, licensing Bola Atta’s Flair Productions to continue publishing True Love magazine in Nigeria.
The media establishment left in the wake of its unceremonious exit an army of jobless Nigerians and huge financial losses for itself. One observer confirms to M2 that the company was forced to shut down its operations because its returns on investment fell far below projections. “Despite the high quality of its productions, all three publications in the stable made less than expected returns,” the source says.
Another magazine that suffered similar fate was National Standard, a bi-monthly established by Christ Embassy church as part of its media enterprise. The magazine, established early 2000, started as the first all coloured, all gloss magazine in Nigeria. It had beautiful page planning and creative editorial but staggered through the years and was temporarily rested last year. Recently the church changed the management of the magazine in a bid to get it back to the news stands.
Duupe Adeniran is another publisher whose zeal for the industry has been crushed by tumbling sales. You get the first scent of the decline when you visit www.weddingplannerworld.com. As soon as you log in, you are told to visit next time because the “site is presently undergoing a phase of re-construction.” But that may not be totally correct as her commitment to publishing Wedding Planners has been punctured by declining sales.
The bi-monthly magazine’s print run steadily declined from about 10,000 at the onset to 2,000 and later 1,000 copies before dwindling fortunes forced the current claims of reconstruction. Media watchers fear the magazine may not be published again after a recent hike in printing costs left Adeniran too discouraged to carry on. Wedding Planner has been off the streets in the last three months!
Adeniran’s frustration is a big reality in even the most notable newsrooms in Nigeria, including Tell magazine said to be struggling to cope with staff wages. Daily Independent, owned by former Delta State governor, James Ibori, is also standing on shaky grounds. In recent times, the company has been shut down twice as staff protested non-payment of salaries. Even the major print outfits have not been very impressive given ADVAN 2009 Report on newspaper sales which puts daily circulation figures in this order: Punch 34,264; Sun 25,632; Vanguard 25,241; Guardian 25,222; Thisday 21,703; and Daily Trust 11,672. Tribune, the oldest surviving newspaper in Nigeria, surprisingly manages to sell 8,314 copies per day.

Stakeholder’s Speak
The report also shows that other newspapers including Compass, Daily Independent, Leadership, National Life, New Nigeria, Mirror and the Westerner could barely make 1,600 copies in daily sales. If circulation revenue is the only source of income for the sector, “they will be all history by now,” says Ramon Nasir, a Corporate Affairs staff of UBA.
Nasir maintains that given the economic climate in Nigeria, a newspaper or magazine will need to do 200,000 copies daily or per print run to survive, hence the rush for advert income. Other stakeholders blame the trouble on Nigeria’s poor economy. “Not that people don’t want to read the papers but they can hardly afford three square meals in a day. So, how do you expect them to buy newspapers?” Iromuanya Elvis, a vendor asks.
Iromuanya says that “poverty among the people has resulted in some people wanting to read newspapers and magazines free to the detriment of the business of vendors.” According to UNICEF, majority of Nigerians are poor, with 71 per cent of the population living on less than one dollar a day and 92 per cent on less than two dollars a day – just about the price of two editions of Punch or Thisday newspapers.
Concerns over the challenges confronting the print media have also been attracting government attention in the USA. On May 6, 2010 the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet held a hearing to review the plight of the newspaper industry to better understand new media and the new model emerging, and to assess the role that government should play in the media as it evolves. The future of journalism hearing was presided over by Subcommittee chair, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who called the hearing in response to the threatened closure of his local paper, the Boston Globe, and the troubles facing newspapers across the country as advertising and circulation decline and the internet quickly replacing traditional media.
The intervention, according to the former US democratic presidential aspirant is, “to preserve the core society function served by the independent and diverse media and sustain the values of professional journalism the way the newspaper industry has.” The House, during the hearing, considered a Newspaper Revitalization Act which proposes a nonprofit, tax-exempt status for newspapers.
Nigerian lawmakers have also considered legislation to revitalize the print media in Nigeria but it appears the documents have been rejected due to some controversial portions that could undermine the freedom of the media. The most recent was the Abike Dabiri Journalism Practice Bill dismissed by stakeholders as obnoxious.
Media marketing experts opine that operators have to cut down their cover prices to command improved sales. “If newspapers are more efficiently managed, the cover prices will not be more than N50 and this will result in bigger sales.” says Dele Sobowale, former general manger, Marketing, in Vanguard newspaper.
Sobowale’s opinion is supported by Ekenyerengozi Chima, CEO of International Digital Post Network, who also thinks that millions of Nigerians will prefer to pay less to read fewer pages of newspapers and magazines than to pay more for more pages because most of them will read only what attracts them and skip or glance over the adverts and other uninteresting things before dropping the newspapers and magazines.
Elucidating on topics that may interest the reading public in Nigeria, Chima says, “Most of them are interested in reading sensational breaking news on politics, crime and social gossip, romance or erotic scandals. The millions of applicants prefer to look for vacancies and that would be all. Therefore, I can bet that a newspaper of only 10 pages on these topics selling for as little as N50 will sell thousands of copies more than Punch or Guardian of 50-100 pages. In fact, they regard most content as garbage and the less garbage or page fillers the better for them.”
Given that PM News and Complete Sports do more sales that most of the big newspapers, Chima’s opinion is perhaps apt.

Re-positioning or Re-packaging the papers?
The story of Broad Street Journal (BSJ) is particularly interesting. BSJ was founded in 2006 strictly as a business weekly magazine with Ibim Semenitari as editor. In three years, writers from the magazine clinched about 10 awards in both the Nigerian Media Merit Awards (NMMA) and Diamond Award for Media Excellence (DAME).
Findings by M2 reveal that staff of the publication have been coalesced into TELL Magazine, a sister publication. One of them while trying to justify the resting of the magazine says, “I’ll like us to put records straight and in the right perspective too. Fine, Broad Street Journal started in hard copy form but that does not mean the management cannot innovate or be dynamic, which is what they have done.”
In further defense of the management’s decision to rest the hard copy version of the magazine, he asserts, “They’re convinced that the next level to take the business to was to go online. You’ll agree with me that online is the way forward for every serious print media and we’re doing the same thing but we are not duty bound to do it the way other people are which is why we are restricting BSJ to an online version alone.”
The source maintains that restricting BSJ to online publishing is not tantamount to resting it, charging that those who consider it so are myopic. He discloses that the current decision is backed by research findings. “Another fact that people are unaware of is that a greater percentage of BSJ readers are those who have access to the internet, so you can see that it pays to reach them via the faster and seamless media.” He concludes.
Mileage, like the BSJ, claims it is not rested but ‘repackaging’ into a pullout inside another publication, News Star. Mileage covered the marketing communications industry and was believed to be widely followed by practitioners in the industry before the sudden repackaging exercise.
Industry watchers are askance at the rationale behind Mileage’s absence at the newsstands. Efforts to speak with the pioneer editor of the paper, Ntia Usukuma, who now doubles as the Business Editor of News Star, were unsuccessful as he could not be reached on phone.
According to Yinka Akande, Director of Brands and Communications, Etisalat, the dwindling advertising revenue – a trend not exclusive to Nigeria – is the reason why some publications are thinking out of the box in their bid to augment their revenue base.
“All over the world advertising revenue is shrinking. Marketers are driven to place adverts in media that they are convinced they can reach their target markets through. That’s why you see newspaper houses going into events and other thought leadership programmes,” he says.