CONTENT, CONNECTIVITY AND NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS IN A DIGITAL AGE

In the course of its 160-year sojourn, the Nigerian press has experienced progress and
challenges that have impacted on its sustainability. Tremendous progress has been recorded in
the areas of news coverage, adoption of technology for news gathering and printing, including
the emergence of multiple printing facilities across the political zones and a ready pool of
trained personnel. However the last one decade has exposed the media industry in Nigeria,
particularly the print section, into perhaps its greatest unanticipated challenge from the field of
technology: the digital disruption of news gathering, news dissemination and news consumption.
Yet, while her counterparts across the globe admittedly also grapple with the same challenge,
little has been seen in the Nigerian media as pragmatic approach to reducing or eliminating the
gradual erosion of its core mandate of information dissemination, education and entertainment
and justifiably, profitability when compared with others across the globe. Several literature have
looked at how the digital disruption mostly affect journalists or media products, but on strength
of the theory of digital disruption as well as argument that the journalist is only the source of
news material, and not the actual producer of news product which also involves other
professionals, this paper attempts an holistic approach to the challenges facing the newspaper
industry as an entity and proposes some critical steps particularly in the areas of content and
connectivity, to stem its current downslide in order to match it up with ongoing global response
to the disruption from technology.

Solomon Oyeleye

Solomon Abiodun Oyeleye is a Lecturer and currently Acting Head, Department of Mass Communication, Caleb University, Imota, Lagos. He was the Best Graduating Student in the 1995 set of Communication and Language Arts Department, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, from where he obtained his Masters and PhD in Applied Communication. As a journalist for several years, who rose to the rank of Assistant Editor and whose working experience took him through several newspaper organisations with their varied interests before joining the academic, he covered several aspects of the Nigerian social and political environment, particularly starting from the 1999 national election to the 2019 edition. He has consulted for the Federal Ministry of Health/UNICEF to develop Training Manual on Advocacy and Social Mobilization for Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV/AIDS (PMTCT) in Nigeria and set up its implementation in various states of the federation. He also consulted for United Nations Population Fund for the development of Advocacy Material Development on Reproductive Health Commodity Security/Maternal Health. He has been a member of the Education Committee on HIV/AIDS, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Kwara State Chapter, and also a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Social Mobilization Committee on Polio Eradication Campaigns, Kwara state. He has been Co-Researcher &Editor, Media and Information Literacy: Non-formal Education Guide for all Platforms. He has attended several trainings and conferences and has a range of scholarly publications. His research interests span media studies, health communication, political communication as well as the Future of Journalism. He is a joint winner of the 2021 Unicef/IAMCR Communication for Development Research Fund Grant. He is a member of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), Association of Communication Scholars and Professionals of Nigeria (ACSPN) where he currently serves as Deputy National Publications Editor, and International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

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