Training The Next Generation Of Journalists

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• For Digital Innovation & Global Impact

It is a pleasure to be part of this important conversation on the business of media, themed “Reinventing Local Newspapers in the Digital Age: Innovation, Sustainability and Global Community Impact.” It is a timely conversation, and about time too, because the declining fortune of the newspaper business has been a nagging topic for more than a decade now.

A drive round any Nigerian city today tells its own story. The printed newspaper has become something of a memento, carried by a few remaining old vendors who, like the papers they hawk, are a dying tribe. Save for the odd occasion when a printed copy is required for an official purpose — a sworn affidavit, a declaration of age, some other statutory formality — not very many people touch a newspaper these days.

Paradoxically, the near-disappearance of the newspaper from the daily menu does not necessarily mean a decline in the consumption of media content. If anything, people probably consume more content today than they ever did. (In my days as an executive at Vanguard, I received a daily supply of about fourteen newspapers and probably read less than twenty percent of that stack. Today, by contrast, I consume far more content — text, voice, audiovisual — on a handheld device that never once dirties my fingers with printer’s ink).

Those newspapers were more than reading material. They were work tools, creative tools for production people, and status symbols for others. As a journalist on the production desk, you ran your pen through advance copies, correcting errors and fitting copy to house style. Newspapers were read and then passed from hand to hand. So much fetish was made of the “pass-on rate” of newspapers — in lieu of the unavailable ABC circulation figures — when courting advertising agencies. That story has changed, and it has changed permanently.

The New Competitors: Influencers, OAPs and the Laptop Publishers. The influence of the newspaper editor, and of the newspaper brand itself, has not entirely waned. The soft power that a respected masthead once carried is still, to some degree, pervasive. But there are new champions in the field now, and they go by the name of influencers — global players who run no factories and carry no wage bills. Some are known as OAPs, on-air personalities, who are not necessarily conventionally trained journalists. This new crop does not suffer the high blood pressure that afflicts the media executive whose wage bill may be in arrears. There are now legions of publishers whose only factory is a laptop and a data subscription. There are countless content creators too, many of them passing themselves off as journalists, without ever having been trained as one.

They carry no professional credentials in the conventional sense. All they possess are gadgets, internet access, and the confidence to use them. Some, indeed, make open mockery of the trained journalist. Even within the regular, established media platforms, the old order has shifted. Gone are the days when a reporter would ossify for a career on the Crime Desk, or the Judiciary beat, or wherever else they were first assigned. Gone, too, is the era when a reporting team would comprise, as separate specialists, the reporter, the features writer and the photographer.

In the era now passed, a young person applied specifically to be trained as a reporter, or as a sub-editor. The same specialisation applied to features writing, and to proofreading. Technology has shrunk that space and closed out much of the old inefficiency. Today’s media professional is expected to play smart — and to play many roles at once.

THE BRIEF: TRAINING THE SMART KIDS

So the question becomes urgent and specific: how do we train the smart kids — the next generation of journalists — for digital innovation and global impact? That, in essence, is the brief this paper addresses.

It is worth recalling what the old challenge in journalism training used to be. Apart from mastery of the use of English Language and ethical requirements. It was statistics and numeracy. Journalism trainers of an earlier generation tried hard to produce graduates who were not entirely at sea when they stepped into a world full of analysts, economists and statisticians. The aim was to equip young journalists to practise informed, interpretative journalism — to hold their own, and not appear hopelessly out of their depth, when confronted with hard business facts and figures. That effort sat alongside broader general studies: politics, basic science, and the like.

Some training institutions even tried to introduce trainees to a second language, beyond English, on the theory that a journalist should be able to communicate and comprehend a little, should they ever find themselves reporting from unfamiliar territory. I cannot claim much success was made of that particular effort in my own case — I recall learning French largely by rote memorisation, purely to scrape through the required examinations. Today, that translation problem has essentially been solved by technology. The digital translator now lives inside the application software on every phone. The real skill required

is no longer memorising vocabulary; it is mastering the right prompt to give the machine. And that points to the next, larger frontier: artificial intelligence.

AI IS THE NEXT GAME

Artificial Intelligence is, without question, the next game in journalism training, as it is in almost every other field of endeavour. But it would be a mistake to see AI merely as a new item to be added to an existing curriculum, like one more subject squeezed into an already crowded timetable.

The real task is to train journalists entrepreneurially — as total content producers, capable across every category of journalism practice — because the formal, salaried newsroom jobs that once absorbed generations of graduates may simply no longer be there in the numbers they once were. What increasingly exists instead is contract work, gig assignments and a marketplace that rewards, above all else, quality output delivered on tight timelines.

This has direct implications for what a journalism school must invest in, and how it must reorganise its teaching.

INVESTING IN INFRASTRUCTURE

Going forward, journalism training institutions need to invest substantially in digital newsrooms, television studios, radio studios and stations, multimedia laboratories, and dedicated communication research capacity. A journalism graduate cannot be expected to walk into a converged, digital-first newsroom having only ever handled a notebook and a tape recorder. The training environment must, as closely as possible, mirror the working environment the graduate will actually enter.

Alongside that physical and technical investment, there must be a disciplined expansion of the curriculum itself, across several connected areas.

Digital journalism — the gathering, producing, publishing, distributing and monetising of news using digital technologies and online platforms — must sit at the centre of training. This is a far bigger discipline than simply migrating newspaper stories onto a website. Properly understood, digital journalism integrates multimedia storytelling, data journalism, audience engagement, artificial intelligence and analytics directly into the news production process, from the first reporting stage to the moment a story reaches —and is monetised for — its audience.

Multimedia storytelling — the integrated use of words, sound, images, video, data and interactivity — is what allows a story to be reported and presented in the most engaging and informative way possible on a digital platform. A generation of journalists trained only to write text for a printed page will struggle in an environment where the same story might need to live as a short video, an interactive graphic, a podcast segment and a social post, all at once.

Strategic communication deserves a place of real prominence in modern journalism and communication training. It is the deliberate, planned and goal-oriented use of communication to influence attitudes, shape perceptions, change behaviour and achieve organisational or societal objectives.

As a coordinated discipline, it integrates public relations, corporate communication, marketing communication, advertising, crisis communication, digital communication and stakeholder engagement into a single, coherent strategy. It must be purpose-driven, audience-centred and research-based; it must be measurable; and, above all, it must remain ethical, because trust is the currency on which the entire enterprise depends.

Corporate communication, as a core component of strategic communication, focuses on how organisations communicate with their own employees, their customers, investors, regulators, the media, government and the wider public. Training programmes that ignore this dimension leave graduates unprepared for the many communication roles that exist entirely outside the traditional newsroom, in corporate Nigeria and beyond.

Finally, social media management and media entrepreneurship round out the picture. These are no longer optional electives; they are close to compulsory survival skills for anyone entering media practice today, whether inside an established organisation or as an independent content producer building an audience and a business from a laptop.

SUSTAINABILITY AND THE BUSINESS MODEL QUESTION

No discussion of training can be honestly separated from the question of sustainability, which sits directly in the theme of this seminar. It is tempting, in a paper like this, to speak only of skills and curricula, as though the crisis of the local newspaper were purely a pedagogical one. It is not.

A brilliantly trained graduate, equipped with every digital skill this paper has described, still needs a viable business to work within, or a viable business of their own to build.

That is precisely why the entrepreneurial dimension of training matters so much. The old newspaper business model — cover price plus classified and display advertising, underwritten by a captive readership with few alternatives — has collapsed in most markets and is collapsing in ours. What replaces it is not yet fixed or settled anywhere in the world: subscription and membership models, reader-revenue strategies, philanthropic and grant funding for public-interest journalism, events and training arms, syndication, licensing of content to platforms, and increasingly, direct-to-audience monetisation through the same social platforms that were once blamed for killing the newspaper business.

A journalist trained only to gather and write news, without any understanding of how that news is to be funded and sustained, is being sent into the market only half-equipped. Media entrepreneurship, then, is not a soft add-on to the curriculum; it is close to the whole point.

Sustainability also has an institutional dimension. Training schools themselves must be run sustainably, with the same discipline they are meant to instil in their graduates — sound management accounting, careful stewardship of scarce resources, and a realistic sense of what infrastructure can be maintained rather than merely acquired. A digital newsroom or a multimedia laboratory bought once and left to decay teaches the wrong lesson entirely.

THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY IMPACT DIMENSION

The seminar theme also asks us to think about global community impact, and this deserves direct attention, because it is easy for a conversation about local newspapers to remain narrowly local. The paradox of the digital age is that the most local story can now travel furthest. A well-reported piece on a flooded community in the Niger Delta, or a corruption scandal in a small local government area, can — if produced with the right multimedia sensibility and distributed through the right channels — reach a diaspora audience, an international development agency, a global newsroom looking for partnership content, or a worldwide audience on a video platform, within hours of publication.

This has real consequences for training. The next generation of journalists must be taught to think, from the very first draft of a story, about audiences beyond the immediate locality: the Nigerian diaspora, international development and humanitarian actors, global media partners, and the wider community of people anywhere who have a stake in African stories being told accurately and well. That means training in cross-border ethical standards, an awareness of how stories translate — linguistically and culturally — across markets, and comfort working within international partnership and syndication arrangements. A local newspaper reinvented for the digital age is, almost by definition, no longer only local in its reach, even where it remains resolutely local in its mission and its news judgment.

A CURRICULUM BEING MODERNISED

It is encouraging that this shift is being formally recognised at the policy level in Nigeria. The National Universities Commission’s Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) framework has itself been modernised to expand Mass Communication beyond a single, undifferentiated programme. Today, there is a broader discipline recognised as Communication and Media Studies, with specialised pathways that include Journalism and Media Studies, Broadcasting, Public Relations, Strategic Communication, Advertising, Development Communication Studies, Film and Multimedia Studies, and Information and Media Studies. This restructuring clearly aligns Nigerian journalism education more closely with international practice, and it reflects, at the level of policy, the same convergence of traditional and digital media that is reshaping the profession on the ground.

At the polytechnic level, under the National Board for Technical Education, this same broad restructuring has been condensed into three specialised pathways: Journalism and Media Studies, Strategic Communication and Media Studies, and Film and Media Studies. The direction of travel, at both university and Polytechnic level, is the same — away from a single, generalist Mass Communication degree, and towards focused, industry-relevant specialisation that anticipates where the profession is actually heading.

A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE OLD WORLD

It may help, in closing, to set this argument against the era of our journalism career, because the distance travelled illustrates the scale of change now demanded of the next generation.

Before the era we now take for granted, at least here in Nigeria, ours was overwhelmingly a world of print. Broadcasting was a government monopoly, tightly controlled, until April 24, 1992 when General Babangida broke that jinx with Decree Number 38 establishing the National Broadcasting Commission ( NBC). DAAR Communication Plc was licensed in 1993 and Raypower 100.5 FM in Alagbado started broadcast September 1, 1994.

Before that moment, print was effectively it. University of Nigeria, Nsukka pioneered training at the degree level of journalists in Nigeria in 1961. That was at the Jackson School of Journalism now the Faculty/ Department of Mass Communication, modeled after the American brand of journalism scholarship. There you learned under distinct cohorts: Print, Broadcast and Public Relations/Advertising. There was training newspaper- The Record, printed in the early 80s by the Anambra State printing press. To get it produced, students would travel to the Enugu premises of the Daily Star newspaper. Same students undertook internships across two full holiday seasons, spread deliberately across newspapers, magazines, radio and the state-owned broadcast platforms of the day. It was a different world altogether — almost our own Stone Age, when set against today’s landscape.

The Department of Mass Communication of University of Lagos, like many others operated — same style, same scope, similar rites of passage for the students. Interestingly, Mass Communication studies is one of the most sought-after courses in our universities and Polytechnics. As at the last count, not less than 110 universities and 60 Polytechnics offer Mass Communication or Communication and Media Studies under the strict supervision of NUC and NBTE.

For students of the past era, the workplace, when we eventually entered it, closely mimicked what the classroom had prepared us for. Fresh graduates applied to work as Reporters. In time, the more fortunate among ones were promoted to the production desk. The Editors of that era were, in every meaningful sense, all-powerful. They determined what content ran and what did not. The sub-desk was the supreme authority over a story’s final form: they cast it, and they bound it.

Production itself was a distinct trade with its own cast of specialists — from the reporter physically pounding the beats: crime, judiciary, politics, economics, metro, government bureaucracy, and so on. Many of these reporters were narrow specialists, and most stayed narrow by design. Behind them ran a fixed assembly line, from the newsroom through to the printing press, each stage handled by a different set of hands.

CONCLUSION:

THE ABIODUN ATOBATELE STORY

Let me close with a story. About 6 years ago, a young, rather impudent neighbour who shared a location with me in the Journalists’ Estate told me, to my face, that journalism as we knew it — in the traditional sense — was dead. Abiodun Atobatele is an IT vendor who has done very well for himself. I had approached him at the time to take on a young ward of mine for training in ICT, because that ward had not made the JAMB cut-off mark required to study Accounting at the University of Lagos. The university had instead offered the ward a place in the Faculty of Education, and we were on the verge of rejecting that offer outright when Atobatele intervened with a piece of advice: the boy should accept the offer, and use it purely as a foundation from which to pursue whatever ambition he actually had in life.

That advice rested on a simple observation about the impact of information and communication technology on old, settled professions — accountancy among them, but journalism, in Atobatele’s estimation, more impacted than most.

It is, indeed, a new world. Consider the distance travelled. From a world where print alone carried the weight of public information, to today’s converged, always-on, AI-assisted media environment. From a training model built around narrow specialists moving along a fixed assembly line, to a demand for entrepreneurial, multi-skilled content producers who can report, shoot, edit, publish, distribute and monetise, often single-handedly, across platforms that did not exist a generation ago.

Our task, as trainers and as leaders of media institutions, is to prepare the next generation for that world, and not for the one most of us were trained in. We must invest in the infrastructure — the digital newsrooms, the studios, the multimedia laboratories — that lets students practise in conditions resembling the real thing. We must expand and modernise the curriculum, embracing digital journalism, multimedia storytelling, strategic and corporate communication, social media management and media entrepreneurship as core, not peripheral, subjects. We must teach the smart use of artificial intelligence, not as a threat to be resisted but as a tool to be mastered, much as an earlier generation had to master the typewriter, and then the desktop computer, and then the internet.

In our new world of the digital age, Time is very short, and Technology holds the key. Artificial Intelligence now contends with human journalists for a measure of dominance over the craft. I cannot predict, with any certainty, who will ultimately win that particular battle. But I am certain of this much: the local newspaper, and the profession that built it, will only reinvent itself successfully if the people we train today are equipped for the world as it now is — not the world, however fondly remembered, that most of us came up in.

A paper delivered at the One Day Journalism Conference themed “Reinventing Local Newspapers in the Digital Age: Innovation, Sustainability and Global Community Impact” at Caleb University, Imota Ikorodu Lagos July 20, 2026  By Gbenga Adefaye Provost, Nigerian Institute of Journalism Lagos

Thank you