By Reuben Abati 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 life and times, and here comes Azu sending me a book in which he talks about how our hustle can be monetized.
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 he has been keeping the secret to himself until now that he thinks he can share some of the tips? He has been keeping secrets? The speed with which I rushed, to use a common phrase, into the book 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 more than 30 years.
He got me hooked. With a catchy title he gets you into the story, and he 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 ec.
