“New Technology Versus the Pursuit of Facts”

By Emeka Izeze |  Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief, The Guardian, Lagos, Nigeria

It is probably an understatement to conclude that media practice will never be the same again, with the advent of new technology. Things that posed a challenge in the past have suddenly become common place. And for a third-world country like Nigeria, the changes are nothing short of revolutionary. The pursuit of fact and the desire to sift it from rumours has become more streamlined. Information is no longer hard to come by; the task now is how to decipher the useful and useless.

In responding to George Gilder’s paper, I have chosen to briefly share our experience in Nigeria regarding the impact of new technology in the course of our job. Cell phones, for one, have become among the most widely used appliances by both the adult and youth populations. It has suddenly served to guarantee information flow in a manner that was hitherto inconceivable. It has enabled us to overcome traditional infrastructural limitations when reporting on events or transmitting information.

A recent case in point was the coverage of the general elections in April (2007). Reporters in far-flung corners of our country were able to bridge the distance by keeping in constant touch with our head office. (Nigeria has a land mass of nearly 911,000 square kilometers). We needed constant update of voters’ turnout, situation report around polling centres, conduct of electoral officials and law enforcement agents deployed to keep the peace. In the old days, we would have had to wait until the end of polling for reporters to file stories to the newsroom in the head office. This time, through the use of mobile phones, some reporters were required to send in their minute-by-minute update by SMS, or physical phone calls.

The impact was far-reaching. It enabled news managers to immediately build a clear and unfiltered picture of events around the country, decide on the direction the news coverage in the next day’s paper should take. They got instantly, breaking or anticipated news copies, thereby greatly facilitating their planning and processing of news. They tracked and reported instantly, incidents of ballot stuffing or theft and other forms of electoral fraud. There was no equivocation in our reports on occasions where balloting did not hold at all, even though officials were later to release spurious results from such non-existent polling centres.