Why electronic media is excluded from Promasidor Quill ward

When the issue of why the electronic media is not included in the reward came up recently at a press parley to unveil the plans for the second edition of Promasidor Quill awards for journalists, Charles Igbinidu, managing director of TPT International, the media agency to Promasidor, said “most business news in Nigeria’s electronic media is commercialized. If the stories are paid for why still recognize the stories.”

The company has added two more categories to the existing five awards, all around print media reportage. The two new categories are Best Report on Children and Future Writer of the Year. It would be recalled that the first edition of the event last year had five categories comprising the Brand Advocate of the year, Best Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report of the year, Most Educative Report of the year, Best Report on Nutrition and the Best Photo Story of the year.

Over the years, the public has expressed disgust over the boring programmes churned out by some television and radio stations. Another great concern to the public, particularly the marketing community, is what marketers called “indignant commercialisation of news by these stations. Almost every corporation’s news and events are seen by these stations from commercial perspective.”

This development appears deep-seated in the industry that the TV and radio stations have re-defined the concept of news to mean naira-related, instead of airing news that means something to people. News is to inform the audience. “It is the job of all the news media to tell the people what is going on in their community – locally, nationally or globally. In this sense, the news media provide a valuable public service.”

According to a media analysts, if everything is said to have commercial news value for the broadcast industry, do the stations then air proper news. What is the thin line between news and commercial news? If they had more commercial news than what they consider as proper news in a day, will there be news that day, he asked. He said the public for instance, expects information concerning any public quoted company but when such information from the quoted company is paid for, then it is not news.

Regretting what marketing operators described as in-discriminate charge for ‘news’ or referred to in marketing parlance as “Let Them Pay’ syndrome, a marketing consultant regretted that the concept of paid news or transactional news has been the practice in the broadcast industry in Nigeria for many years. “Even if the news will make you remotely look good, or it does the society a lot of good, it does not get aired unless you pay for it. Even major road contractors cannot freely pass information to the public about road closures or diversions or even potential danger on the roads. They must pay for it. It has been like that for years, perhaps decades,” he said.

According to him in earlier report, advertisers have come to accept the development as a norm, “but if you have foreigners coming into Nigeria to play roles in marketing communications, this may come as a rude shock. They will have to unlearn some of the things they imbibed in the classroom and learn how things are done here.”