Kenyan readers need – and demand – more from their media

What you need to know:

  • What we seem to have from our media outlets is news tailored for traditional forms – radio, print and TV – made available on digital platforms.
  • It is my hope that Kenyan media managers, journalists and news editors are attuned to the growing dissatisfaction with their output, whether or not it satiates their  revenue  bottom lines.
  • An average internet user has no shortage of apps or sites demanding their time and attention.

The intersection of media and technology has been a very interesting space to operate in and observe over the last half decade.

Suffice it to say, digital technologies and their offerings have gone from the fringes to the mainstream in the media industry.

In many newsrooms there is, and has been, talk of digital convergence and any news editor and media manager keen on surviving into the next decade in the business must be thinking about digital.

In Kenyan media, the key actors have, in various ways, had to adapt to digital in its full form, beyond simply having a website, e-paper and reader comments sections.

In fact, Kenyan media organisations are hailed across the continent as leaders in digital convergence. But are the needs of an increasingly digital Kenyan audience these being met by our media today?

What we seem to have from our media outlets is news tailored for traditional forms  radio, print and TV  made available on digital platforms.

For TV, we have YouTube channels with recaps of what was aired in the news. For radio, we mostly have hashtags with which to follow the conversation.

For print, we have websites carrying the same content before or after the same has appeared on print versions, with the  exception of blog sections such as where this article appears.

While this is a sound first step in digitising news, it is not the same as producing news content or practising journalism for the digital era.

It is my hope that Kenyan media managers, journalists and news editors are attuned to the growing dissatisfaction with their output, whether or not it satiates their  revenue  bottom lines.

In my view, there are two things we are yearning to see improved by our media, especially within the realm of opportunities in this digital and information age. These are content and context

CONTENT IS KING

As the saying goes, “content is king”. Anyone can produce content; just arm them with a mobile phone and an Internet connection.

This infographic provides a glimpse of just how much content is generated on the internet per minute. User-generated content can be just as informative as content produced by traditional media.

The “trusted or authoritative source of news” brand that traditional media hitherto relied on is fading away in the digital era. Among Kenyans on Twitter or WhatsApp, for instance, there is a growing peer-to-peer news network.

This reality was further cemented during the three-odd weeks when the three major TV stations staged a protest to the digital migration process. #KoTNewsat9 was a curious display of numerous hard-hitting stories that targeted the then-absent 7pm and 9pm TV newscasts.

Breaking news is no longer the preserve of traditional media and hasn’t been for a while. As someone quipped a while back on Twitter:

Social media gives us real time news, newspaper editors, the news you give us today we already read yesterday, you are now Jana-lists.

The quip, in my view, embodies a popular sentiment among digital news consumers. There is a yearning for more than just news content from mainstream media entities.

Content in the digital age is playing for the attention economy. An average internet user has no shortage of apps or sites demanding their time and attention.

Quality of content is therefore, the only thing that will make media’s content stand out in the information superhighways of the Internet.

Quality could range from “solutions journalism” - helping audiences navigate through possible solutions and what’s working to solve problems-  to data journalism, weaving stories that better inform us about our society based on the data we generate.

There is more to data journalism than producing infographics with numbers and figures.

RISE OF THE AD BLOCKERS

Then there are ads, often embedded within the news content. As readers, we can appreciate that revenue has to be generated, but the ad model adopted is flawed, to the point of very likely putting off readers from going past the first page of a news story. I hypothesise that the numbers prove this as well. 

The tension is a complex one, no doubt: sell as many ads against content as possible, but also retain readers long enough on the site for this to pay off.

Yet the use of ad blockers is on the rise, because the model in play is short-sighted. The content against which these ads are placed is often sensational clickbait, and while we all love a juicy story promised in a catchy title, it is annoying and off-putting to feel ‘tricked’ by a notable news or journalistic entity, just to serve as eyeballs to ads.

It is also important for our media to appreciate that just because we are informed doesn’t mean we are empowered to act.

There is often very little reporting on actions that the same audience can take to address the issues raised, making for an informed, but disillusioned audience.

This, in my view, has led to the increasingly popular sentiment of opting out of watching or reading news, “because it’s all depressing (or politics).”

To sum up, it is no longer sufficient to merely produce content. It boils down to quality, and even more importantly, context.

THE HOW AND THE WHY

“Content is king, but context is god,” is an apt modification of the aforementioned popular saying.

We have no shortage of content, but context is often missing. This presents a vast opportunity for media organisations to leverage their strengths and put them to use in the digital age.

Most news content, whether user or media- generated, informs on the ‘what’, not so much the ‘how’ or the ‘why’.  It cannot be emphasised enough that it is lazy and a disservice to assume that readers are informed on the issues being reported.

A good example of this is the Imperial Bank saga. Mainstream media’s reporting on this informed on what was unfolding, leaving many of us confounded and yearning for the missing pieces, the context to the story.

Owaahh, a blogger armed with the same dossier that journalists had, was able to weave together a narrative that helped us reconcile the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions. Ironically, the latter may have engaged in a more journalistic act than practising journalists.

News organisations’ resources are skewed to producing content, and way less on providing context, which in my view, is a counterproductive approach.

To generate context, time and resources need to be unlocked from the rat race that is ‘breaking news’. The resources, I contend, are more misallocated than they are scarce.

Explainer journalism is an emerging trend with international media organisations keen to take their mandate to the next level. As Qifan Zhang says:

Explainer journalism specialises in the “why” and “how,” so that the “who, what, when, where” make more sense.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the Kenyan citizen is bombarded with too much information on any given day. Sure, that’s the news. But news isn’t all there is to journalism.

As Ezra Klein, founder of Vox.com, one of the most popular digital media sites specialising in explainer journalism puts it:

New information is not always — and perhaps not even usually — the most important information for understanding a topic ... The web has no such limits. There's space to tell people both what happened today and what happened that led to today. But the software newsrooms have adopted in the digital age has too often reinforced a workflow built around the old medium. We've made the news faster, more beautiful, and more accessible. But in doing we've carried the constraints of an old technology over to a new one.”

This dearth of context could perhaps be attributed to the Kenyan media skewed focus on reporting, rather than practising journalism in its full form. George F. Snell captures the crux of this point:

Journalism is getting beneath the news. It’s investigation, analysis and thoughtful commentary. It’s in-depth expository reporting.  And people are still willing to pay for good journalism.

So, dear Kenyan media, I am more than willing to pay for good journalism, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. This country needs you to take your work to the next level. It is your duty in the public interest.

Twitter: @NiNanjira