I was drawn to this book almost instantly by its title – Writing for Media and Monetising It. Azu Ishiekwene , the author, and I have been colleagues and friends for decades. We have spent more or less the same stretch of time in this business of reporting and analysing society and other people’s lives and times, and here comes Azu sending me a book in which he talks about how our hustle can be monetised.
Is there something Azu knows that I don’t know? And in this our business of being friends, he has been making money on top of our heads and keeping the secret to himself until now that he thinks he can share some of the tips? Has he been keeping secrets? The speed with which I rushed into the book to use a common phrase is imaginable. My discovery is that the title is misleading. Azu is a vintage, tested editor, a master of headlines-casting and crafting – something he has done for over 30 years.
He got me hooked. He gets you into the story with a catchy title and leads you on. He knows the game.
So, catch the reader’s attention, a precious commodity in journalism and then peel the story, layer by layer in an onion-peeling fashion. In terms of procedure, this is what Azu Ishiekwene does in this book. For the benefit of the ordinary enthusiast, journalism is not a money-making machine for the reporter, the editor, the producer or the cameraman, especially in a country like Nigeria where, due to the general dispossession of the economy, media owners are struggling to.
