A few opinions on journalistic methods

Are we ready for agenda journalism?

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A few thoughts on methods

In 2021, I wrote a newsletter arguing that Nigerian journalism needed a reckoning over methods. The impetus for that argument was “Cornflakes for Jihad,” a viral article by a journalist at the height of his fame. Several smart editors told me not to publish. I did anyway, because it’s always worth putting methodological disagreements on the record. I have been thinking about those methods again with another publication that’s now at the height of its powers.

GST, the youth-focused political media platform, has built something many Nigerian political media have struggled with: a real sense of urgency among young people. Communiqué’s recent profile describes it as a media platform and a vehicle for real-time civic participation. It is social-first and organised around a logic of story, campaign, pressure, and response. Its founder, Adewunmi Emoruwa, has said openly that GST rejected the principle of strict neutrality from the start. “We are going to editorialise from the beginning,” he told Communiqué. “We’re going to give people the truth.”

That should interest anyone who cares about the media, because Nigerian journalism has spent years trying to get young people interested in politics. The industry has tried explainers, breaking news, video, simplification, Instagram packaging — all the usual tricks for making politics feel accessible. A few of those digital publications have become real cultural touchpoints.

GST has found that what really moves people is not format but stance. It is succeeding because it offers some young audiences explanation and alignment; it’s a publication that shares their anger and tells them what to do with it.

Nigerian media has a credibility problem with young audiences, with legacy outlets widely perceived as deferential to power and reluctant to hold the line when it matters. In that environment, a publication that is openly adversarial toward government is filling a vacuum that traditional journalism created by failing to be adversarial enough.

People do not want GST to be neutral because they do not believe neutrality, as practised by Nigerian newsrooms, has produced accountability. They want someone who will say the thing and stay on it until something moves. You can compare this to Fox News in the US, although the analogy is imperfect because Nigeria does not have a left-right ideological axis in the American sense, so GST is not anchoring one end of a partisan divide. It is closer to a mood: the widespread sense among younger Nigerians that the political class is extractive and unaccountable, and that the media has been more interested in access than in pressure.

There is also a structural argument in GST’s favour. Traditional accountability journalism in Nigeria has historically stopped at revelation. An investigation gets published, it trends for a day, and for the public, nothing happens, and everyone moves on.

The distance between “informed” and “activated” is itself a democratic failure, and GST’s model — story, campaign, pressure, response — is an attempt to close that gap. If the point of journalism is to serve the public interest, and if the public interest requires not just information but consequence, then you can argue that GST is doing what the rest of the industry has been too polite to do.

Yet, it’s worth asking, what does this kind of stance do to the reporting?

Once a publication is organised to generate pressure, it is incentivised not just to find out what is true but to identify the version of the truth most useful for mobilisation. Facts that sharpen the case move to the front, and nuance gets shunted to the side. What discipline can one hope for once a newsroom begins with its conclusion?

Consider GST’s coverage of the tax reform bills. The underlying grievance against the tax reforms was real and widely shared. Nigeria’s public services are poor, and the trust deficit between citizens and the state is enormous; it has created the feeling that taxation without adequate public infrastructure is extractive. There is a legitimate debate to be had about whether this government has earned the right to ask for more.

Yet, in GTS’s video on the tax bill, the platform told its audience: “There are no tax reforms here that benefit you. None.” It described the reforms as “theft.” It asked whether taxes have ever helped Nigerians and answered its own question: “Not in a million years.”

What the video didn’t do at any point was engage with what the reforms actually contained. The bills raised the income tax exemption threshold to ₦800,000 for low-income earners. The bill reduced Company Income Tax from 30% to 25%. They exempted small businesses with a turnover under ₦50 million. You can argue these provisions are insufficient, or that the government cannot be trusted to implement them honestly. Those are fair arguments and worth making, but their tax videos did not make them. It simply declared the entire enterprise a fraud and moved on.

When you have a viewpoint, supporting facts are amplified. Facts that complicate it are pushed aside.

Every reporter who has done serious work knows this process: you begin with a hunch, then you make calls, read documents, speak to more people. At some point, the story shifts. Sometimes it softens, and other times it turns against your original instinct. Sometimes you find that your first take was too neat. That is the journalistic method.

Facts do not always arrange themselves into clean narratives unless someone leaves some of them out. A government policy might be badly designed, but also solve a real problem. An official might be corrupt and also be right about the thing they are being attacked for. The discipline of reporting is the willingness to hold both possibilities open until the evidence closes one of them.

Serious policy stories require the journalist to go and find the people who actually understand the subject and let those people complicate the picture. The expert who says “it’s not that simple” is not being unhelpful; they are giving you the story.

Ultimately, the thing to think about is that once an audience understands that a publication has a position on editorial identity, they begin to discount it.

The reporting might be accurate, and the facts might be right, but the reader knows that the facts were selected to build a case, and so they feel a pull to go and hear the other side before forming a view.

Fox covers real stories and breaks real news, but you don’t watch Fox believing that you’re getting the complete picture. You watch Fox to get the Fox version, and then you might even check CNN to get another frame.

This kind of journalism eventually loses its authority to settle questions. A platform built to mobilise might consider this an acceptable trade-off — you do not need to be the definitive account if you can be the most energising one. But the publication trains its own audience to treat it as a source of perspective rather than a source of fact, and once that expectation sets in, it is very difficult to reverse.