In the 20 years I’ve been burning my youth at the Nation, many of our colleagues from marketing, finance, logistics and other departments have left to start their own media empires.
I remember one of our inspired colleagues left to start a magazine exclusively on the constitutional review process.
Had I advised him that though the review process was all the rave, a magazine on the subject wasn’t a brilliant idea, he wouldn’t have listened.
The mortality rate for these start-ups — or upstarts, to borrow a spoonerism from an ambitious upstart — is damn near 100 per cent.
It takes talent, intelligence, a special mental disposition and a lifetime of training to produce a good journalist.
Which normal human being would be prepared to die, without a second thought, for 500 words? And it takes skill and obsessive dedication to produce good journalism.
Unfortunately, it’s quite impossible to explain this to a layman; they always imagine anyone can do it. Even when they fail at it.
The same kind of misunderstanding also attends the larger purpose of journalism. Your average grabber thinks the media are here to ruin the party — and, indeed, they are.
The politician, fragile of ego and incapable of taking even the slightest of criticism, and none too honest, also has fratricidal thoughts about the Press.
But it’s the newly empowered millennials, with access to Twitter and mum’s Wi-Fi, who have the least appreciation about the purpose and importance of a free Press. After all, anybody can write, right?
As part of the ‘cattle rustling’ project, I’m doing a whole load of reading. One of the reports I worked my way through in the traffic yesterday morning was lamenting that 1,300 communities in the US had lost their “local news coverage entirely” since 2004.
The media tell people what’s happening; they mobilise the community around causes of common interest; they expose wrong and celebrate the noble; they find out useful stuff for you; they help you form an opinion about the things happening around you and make sense of an increasingly complex world.
Today, our world is awash with words, pictures and video. Lots of it is disinformation — lies intended to mislead, lies pretending to be the truth, plain lies, ignorance, mistakes and grains of truth scattered among the rocks of untruth.
In this choking world, people are asking for free information. Of course there is no such thing; somebody always pays.
If you are not paying for news, an advertiser is. And the digital advertiser doesn’t give a hoot about the quality of what you are receiving; he is interested in what brings the biggest crowd to see his message.
Digital advertising and sensational fluffy news are joined at the hip. The sensation traps the crowd and, since the digital advertiser is a bad payer, the publisher can’t afford to invest in quality content.
But free news is very expensive. It’s damaging; it’s bad for everyone concerned.
The Internet Age is based on the assumption that information is free; in other words, it has no value.
How an expensive process, requiring skill and the application of expensive tools can produce an item that serves an important function in people’s lives but which is presumed to have no value is beyond me.
In my opinion, news must have a price and that price must be paid by those who use it. It shouldn’t be primarily recovered by aggregating users and selling them to salesmen.
If people pay a (very small) fee to read the news, then everyone’s mind is concentrated on one thing: gathering, processing and disseminating the best quality news ever.
For us here on the Equator, this is the future. In some other countries which are 10 years ahead of us, this is the present.
No society has proved how critically and desperately important it is to have a strong independent media than the US in the era of President Donald Trump.
Every day I read the Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico and Huffpost and watch CNN and other American media and I am just amazed not only at how crooked Trump is, but at the courage, tenacity and commitment of the journalists who expose him and his strange ways daily.
Here at home, Jubilee has done more — short of an outright ban — to destroy the Kenyan media than any other regime since independence.
You only need to look at a recent circular by Head of Public Service Joseph Kinyua banning supplements in newspapers to see how petty the government will get just to financially strangle the media.
This hatred of the Press is based on three things: First, a misunderstanding of what the Press does in a democracy; secondly, a siege mentality created by brokers masquerading as “media experts” and whose solutions invariably involves allegedly paying bribes, and, finally, fear by big people that their kleptomania, misogyny and other anti-social conduct will be exposed and they will be destroyed.
Happily, the future of the Kenyan media is wonderful. A critical mass of enlightened citizens paying as little as Sh50 a day will free it from the commercial stranglehold of the government and its cousins in the advertising world and we will be truly, truly free to serve the people by going after the baddies.
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