I vividly recall having a discussion with a senior journalists who used to be with the BBC and Times of London in her prime and now in semi-retirement keeps a regular column with Vanguard and The Africa Report.
She said that while she was at the University in the UK in the 1970s spilling into the 1980s, she and her course mates used to laugh at their friends who were studying mass communication because in their opinion, not only did they lack a sturdy base as the course was a mishmash of a lot of courses which wasn’t really designed to create experts out of its graduates, journalists were born and not made just like musicians, writers, artists and other creatives. In their opinion, it made sense to study courses like political science, international relations, or history if one desired a career as a political journalist, economics, finance, or economic history if one had an eye for a financial journalist career, English, Linguistics, Languages if one wanted to be a good culture journalist. Studying mass communication was an American invention which was a gargantuan waste of precious time.
Journalism as a profession has undergone numerous changes from the days of Johann Carolus (1575-1634) was the publisher of the Relation aller Furnemmen und gedenckwurdigen Historien (Collection of all Distinguished and Commemorable News) which is the first newspaper in history to Iwe Irohin published by Henry Townsend – the first in Nigeria.
The internet and social media rendered the print media obsolete in a manner that caught media pundits and stakeholders napping. Just about any ‘idiot’ excuse my French can become a media mogul even surpassing the combination of Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg in this information age or Fourth Industrial Revolution Era.
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