234 .... Next

I am impressed with the multimedia news outlet NEXT.

There are other Nigerian newspapers that provide quality service online (too numerous to mention, though The Guardian is excellent, and if you want to escape the Lagos-bubble, check out Daily Trust). And I do appreciate the fact that I can listen to Radio Nigeria's Kapital FM (Abuja) on my computer (though they are frequently off the air) and Brila FM (though they only seem to be talking about the English Premiership when I tune in).

But NEXT is making a conscious effort (in my opinion) to be World-class, as opposed to Naija-class or Africa-class. Come to think of it, most Nigeria web outlets lag behind the leading sites from South Africa, Kenya (I particularly enjoy The East African) and the Maghreb in terms of getting the full experience of current affairs, analysis, audio-visual media and interactive features.

I believe very strongly in the potential of the Nigerian media, and I would not critique it so if I did not care about it. I want them to figure out ways to make money from the worldwide web; while newspapers in the United States and Europe claim to be suffering, the internet gives Nigerian news media a chance to tap into the dollars, euros, and riyals of the Nigerian Diaspora.

I rely on the media for information, and I want the best product I can get. NEXT is not doing anything "new" or "revolutionary", and there are any number of news media sites around the world that do much more. But they seem to be working hard to change the way media sites are run within that sub-set of the world media that is the Nigerian media. Hopefully others catch up and compete; I still like Kickoff Nigeria, but they have not become the one-stop shop for the best in Nigerian football news that I had been hoping (I dare say they provide less information now than they did before.

It is not easy. Soup wey sweet, na money do am, and at some level the sites have to figure out ways of making money to pay for improved information-gathering and investigative journalism.

Good luck to them.

Here are two examples of the audio-visual product from NEXT. Granted they do seem to ask their anchors to blow phonetics on the main news broadcasts (an example below), but they do a weekly news round-up/discussion in Pidgin as well (second below). Perhaps the phonetics evince a desire to attract an "international" audience, as opposed to a strictly Naijan audience.