Ibadan Mail and the need for community newspapers in Nigeria by Augustine Togonu- Bickersteth september 9 2022
Our newspapers tend to focus more on where the wealth is or where power resides.for money or wealth it is lagos and for, power obviously it is Abuja and so you would wonder why anyone would want to publish a paper or magazine devoted exclusuvely to Ibadan city. So it happened with the journalist and publisher Taslim Abiola Layonu maybe for emotional reasons, he is from Ede but his great grand mother was the Iyalode of Ibadan Land
I Edited the Ibadan Mail magazine in the city of Ibadan. it's now defunct/ Then, the residents of Ibadan, indigenes and non indigenes alike kept asking why we decided to have a publication devoted exclusively to ibadan city.. First we explained then,20 years ago that Ibadan had the population to support not only a magazine but a newspaper. Then the central council of Ibadan indigenes revealed there were 1.3 million houses in Ibadan and they reckoned that if each house had 10 people not flat,then there was a conservative estimate of 13 million people then in ibadan. So it should be agreed that the population existed to support publications like Ibadan Mail.
The second reason we gave is that papers like los angeles times, washington post, new york times all started as community newspapers. News is about people and people is about news. Iibadan has people! But somehow the paper died. Perhaps because most publishers, like most entrepreneurs are good at production but poor at operations, marketing, finance, customer service and business development.
I sympathize with A catholic priest in Ekiti reported in the Thisday of September 9 2022 as stating that there is an excessive attention on Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi almost to the total exclusion of the other candidates or all other positions Being contested for.
I would not blame Nigerians for this" excessive attention" rather I put the blame on the absence of enough newspapers and other periodicals that focus on other levels of government aside the federal government like IBADAN MAIL.its not only affecting our politics and democracy negatively but also development ,for instance the buhari government planned 109 integrated farms and several other projects at local government levels .there is no way a national newspaper would monitor effectively 109 senatorial districts with regards to government projects. But some papers have to monitor them.that why we lost billions of Naira to primary health care centers cut across all the local governments in nigeria, this is why there are 56,000 abandoned buildings belonging to government the length and breath of nigeria,
Unfortunately Most Nigerian newspapers strive to assume a national spread if only to maximize profit,.we should not forget that for the most part Nigerian newspapers are not charities for most or all of them profit matters.
There is not much in nigeria in terms of newspapers at the level of the neighborhood the, street ,, community ,,local government constituency,r,senatorial district. State. And regional levels. Cut across this we also need ethnic,Arabic and pidgin english newspaper and periodicals same with radio, TV and the NEW Media/ which might suggest thre are a lot of jobs to be created
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