4th Estate Revolution

A measure of how much Nigeria needs to transform can be taken from the business model that drives the Media in the country. At present, for your content to appear on TV, you have to pay, just as if you were running a TV ad. This means that quality of content is sacrificed to the highest bidder. Of course, this is a back to front version of what should happen: the tv station should pay for the best possible content for each available time slot. The quality of the content drives audience, which in turn pushes up ad revenue. As it is, the current tv business model creates no incentive for improved production values or general quality of content.

A similar business model drives the newspaper business. It is an open secret that a good deal of newspaper content is 'placed'. This is why we see the same tired old faces - bankers, politicians etc in the papers, rather than seeing fresh faces actually doing interesting transformative things. The problem here is the very structure of ownership. Many of the newspapers are owned by big politicians, and are used as a vehicle for a particular slant. You may say there's little difference here between Nigerian newspapers and Western newspapers - except that in the West, it is rather political influence rather than politicians that is directly at work in the newspaper biz. However, the underlying business model is completely different. Again, for newspapers to be read by more than the 20,000 copies per day of the best selling newspapers on offer right now, the quality has to increase 1000 per cent. This means moving away from brown envelope content. This in turn means paying journalists a living wage.

All it would take is one player to come along with a global best practice business model to attract a mass market audience (and talented upcoming journalists) to wipe all of the sham-media out of the way..