NOLLYWOOD AND THE NIGERIAN PRESS

The inability of the entertainment press to probe or focus on the business side of Nollywood is part of the reason why the growth of Nollywood has been stunted over the past few years.  I was reading tweets from a Nollywood insider recently and she opined that for Nollywood to become profitable, it needed a vibrant press discussing and investigating various issues surrounding the industry.

The tweets got me thinking.  From some of the articles i read in the print media, you can discern that some of the people who cover entertainment are mostly uneducated and uninspired fans or failed artists who perchance got jobs at newspaper houses.  Even more appalling is the fact that a great percentage of them are unscrupulous drunks who hang around drinking joints gossiping and making up stories for tomorrow’s papers.

Azu Amatus of Entertainment Express  

The editors of major dailies usually don’t take entertainment seriously so they hardly place any premium on news related to Nollywood especially those relating to big business.  Consequently, what we get are “who slept with whom” stories or regurgitated press releases that nobody investigates before submitting for publication.  Once in a while, you might get some good pieces from the likes of Victor Akande, Shaibu Hussein, Chuks Nwanne, Azuh Amatus but nothing more.

Things have become so bad in recent times, that entertainment and lifestyle blogs have become the first source for news about Nollywood.  These days, advertising dollars usually reserved for the print media is being diverted to blogs in droves as advertisers can see the instant impact of their fees.  Apart from a few bloggers who want to see Nollywood progress into a proper industry, the rest are opportunists who prey on the lowly side of Nollywood enough that they can sit on their beds and make millions of Naira caring nothing of the damage they do to an entire industry.

So what is the future of Nollywood? We cannot predict but what we know is that it will not survive without an educated press corps willing to research and objectively probe the practices of the industry.