Before the advent of the internet, news and information can only be accessed through the first mainstream media which are the newspaper firm and radio stations. When information is being disseminated in the era of newspaper all and radio, you would have to listen attentively to grasp the message being passed by the presenter while in the written platform which is the newspaper, you would have to go to their stands and get your copy in order to be current as events unfold on daily basis. When you get a copy of any publication then you would want flip through the pages and read through lines before you could decode the message.
I could remember during my childhood days when my dad will go to newspaper outlet very early in the morning, sometimes he stays more than five hours at the stand reading with his colleagues. He mostly come back home then with two publications which were Tribune and the Nation newspaper. Price of this shits were so cheap then and always lose its value as it was often dump for disposal after reading them. As a kid then we used them to wrap our notebooks in school, while one of my sister’s then who love meat will always go to suya junction to collect beef from Hausa man.
As this medium required the readers to go through the content to decode the message, so as it’s required for the radio station. When information is being peddled on radio, you must ensure decorum in order to hear what the presenter is trying to say, noise is the major distraction when trying to decode a massage from radio. This vice has a big and portable size that our fathers and mother take to farm just to informed about events from the entire country, if you fail to listen carefully to the end of the news, you may end up not decoding any message from the radio, all your attention must be there to grasp the points of the presenter.
Unarguably, the era of mainstream newspaper is almost gone, many Nigerians now don’t read from the medium again. Radio is still in vogue but the rate at which people listen to radio to get news has reduced a bit as broadcasting has now extended to the new media. Internet is the new media most publications are now operating, the aforementioned media now have websites where they publish their news which they now refer to as online newspaper. Many individuals have created blogs where they disseminate information to the public through social media platforms for easy access to people. Each link of their posts is shared on their social media page where follows are expected to click on and get the full message of the news.
In Nigeria, patience has being the major challenge of the some citizens. Many of these online publications are actually fond of using exaggerating words to write their titles in order to convince the readers to click on the link. As it’s believed this click often generates money to the publishers who monetize their contents through Google or any other Ad network.
It happens that some Nigeria nowadays only read the titles and jump into conclusion, most of their comments over a certain news shared via links are something else as their submissions do not in any way correlate with the message of the contents, and their opinions are always off Point. This reading habit of Nigerians towards online news had made many of them to be ignorant of happenings in the country especially those who do not bother to verify by clicking on the link to read more, this category of people are the major peddler of fake news. We urge Nigerians to be patient when reading news online as most of the titles do not connote the actual message of the whole content.
About Author
