Nigerian bloggers will do anything to drive traffic to their blogs, resulting in the abandoning of guiding principles of professional journalism, according to Noble Igwe, founding partner of 360nob.com.
Igwe told HumanIPO such desperate bloggers and their lazy contemporaries do not bother to confirm news before publishing since they believe it will increase the traffic to their site.
He told HumanIPO newsmakers are not as difficult to talk to in Nigeria as some bloggers think they are.
According to the 360nob.com founder, the celebrities will readily confirm news to important bloggers they know will speak to them first before making posts about them.
Igwe said: “Nigerian bloggers should make themselves to be quite important to the people they get the news from.
“If they know that you are not posting news out of malice, a lot of people will like to introduce you to their PR people or their managers who are also going to give you confirmed information.
“If you want to talk about Genevieve (Nnaji) for instance and she knows if you are going to put any story out on her, you are going to confirm such from her team, she won’t say she won’t give news to you.
“I think what bloggers should do is to position themselves as very important and not people who have ulterior motives for what they are doing.”
He also decried the habit of making what is not newsworthy the centre of many blog posts.
He said: “Many Nigerian bloggers make everything news – we talk about somebody’s makeup, hair, nail polish, picture, celebrity sighting at the mall – we make everything news.”
He encouraged bloggers to make efforts to get invited to events where they can get news first-hand and directly from the sources.
“They can get invited to events where they can get the news as they happen, and they will be able to blog about what they’ve heard without having malice or feeling bad about what is happening,” he said.
