Title: The World of News
Author: Muhammed Rabiu
Publisher: Stirling-Horden, Ibadan
Year: 2013
Pages: 499
Reviewer: Henry Akubuiro
Our everyday life is governed by information. To get the best out of the flux, the pesky newsman must set forth not only at dawn but at dusk in search of news and newsmakers. Even if the atmosphere is humdrum, the newsman is obliged to make out something out of nothing for the curious. Curiosity is prioritised.
Muhammad Rabiu’s The World of News: Career Prospects in Journalism and Mass Communication takes us on a pilgrimage into a world where the news bestirs our existence. Journalism and mass communication get us in the know. But the author wants us to know the intricacies of its workings.
The idea for this book began in the 2005/2006 academic session when the author was a pioneer coordinator of the Department of Mass Communication, Nasarawa State University, Keffi, culminating in 2013 when the book was rolled out of press.
In seven parts, Rabiu breaks down what journalism and mass communication entail, placing emphasis on journalism as a career, the relationship between journalism and mass communication, literature and journalism, the print media, the electronic media, the persuasive media, and job-hunting techniques.
The charm of journalism is unfurled in the first part of the book, as well as its history. Written language is the basis of journalism, hence the author itemises what is required to get a linguistic and stylistic grounding in the profession. The nitty-gritty of journalism and mass communication is explored in the third chapter.
This chapter affords the reader the opportunity to get more useful perspectives on journalism from different sources. The imperative of mass communication is also defined. The author traces the foundation of the department of mass communication in Nigerian universities to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the 1960s. He offers the reasons why the department is located in the faculty of arts of some universities, while other Nigerian universities have it domiciled in the faculty of social sciences. This chapter is also useful to anybody who wants to know how journalists construct the world and how the media has evolved.
The connections between literature and journalism form the background of the second part of the book. Literature, he writes, makes the reporter wiser, bequeathing him with varied ideas. However, while literature is a product of imagination, journalism is based on real events and real people.
Part three, which focuses attention on the print industries, begins with the revolution in the book industry which gave birth to newspapers, the initiators of journalism. “The newspaper was the first agent of modern mass communication. Today, newspapers are the major practitioners of journalism… It has always been so, because, for centuries, newspapers were the only news medium,” he writes (p. 217). Magazine is treated, too, in all ramifications.
The electronic media takes centre stage on the fourth chapter. Beginning with the art of film, the author informs us that early film was an integral part of several well-known European art movements. We are introduced subsequently to the recording industry, birthed by Thomas Edison in 1877, with phonograph, which led to the invention of radio, stereo and different video formats. The chapter imparts sufficient knowledge on the development of radio from interpersonal to mass communication.
While the golden age of television is traced to 1950s, a period attended by good dramatic programming, Rabiu establishes the fact that it wasn’t particularly golden for women, African-Americans, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans who were only cast as stereotypes. Things have since changed, as the author highlights in the evolution of television industry. With the internet, communication gets personal, thanks to the introduction of the World Wide Web.
Dwelling on the persuasive arts in Part Five of the book, we are led into the advertising business. Afterwards, Rabiu takes us to the gamut of public relations. How to manage crisis, public relations strategies, and its ethics are part of the subtopics treated here.
What exactly do journalists do? The answer is provided in Part Six. Using excerpts from six Nigerian journalists –Camillus Eboh, Yinka Olajide and Muhammad Rabiu of Abuja Newsday, Mike Awoyinfa of Concord newspaper, and an interview with Joseph Warungu of the BBC African Service – the reader is offered glimpses of what journalists do. Particularly interesting are two features written by Awoyinfa and Rabiu himself on the seductive Egyptian city of Cairo.
The vital steps required to be taken to succeed in job-hunting are explained, including writing application letters and resume, as well as facing interview panels and salary negotiation. The challenges of journalists in Nigeria and elsewhere and pieces of useful advice to would-be journalists are included here
Though the size of this book may be a put-off to some lazy readers, it is worth the effort at the end with its rich package. Not only students of journalism and mass communication would find this book useful; anybody who wishes to get a foothold on the profession has a new bride to take home.
Taking cursory look at human foibles
Title: Collected Plays 1
Author: Jerry Alagbaoso
Publisher: Kraftbook, Ibadan
Year: 2016
Pages: 205
Reviewer: Henry Akubuiro
The antagonists in Alagbaoso’ s Collected Play 1, comprising Specks in Our Eyes, Sorters and Sortees, Ina-aga, Armchair Parents, and The First Day, are workaday ilks. We feel their steps, manners and antics. Don’t expect do-ggoders to kindle the sky with hurrahs or raise a smile when you are riding high.
We are conversant with the rapacious community leaders who, denied of lucre, get worked up and promise to precipitate Armageddon. The indolent undergrad given to cutting corners has made sorting attractive on campus. What about the randy, married commercial motorcyclist man who can buy the world for his girlfriend while in genteel poverty? Of course, you know the school bully and the money-conscious parents derelict in their duties and tampering with our mood.
You better get yourself psyched up. Alagbaoso’s plays bristle with these characters, but the plots do not banalize unendingly. Though the plays teem with diverse social themes, each of the plays has one thing or two to do with the school and students. Haven’t shenanigans taken roots in the fabrics of our educational system? No two ways about it.
The first play in the collection, Speck in Our Eyes, satirises a community whose chauvinistic leadership is hypocritical, evidenced in the sham probe launched against the highflying principal of the community secondary school, Lady Ijeyibo. Through the intervention of youths of Ama Ihite, it becomes glaring that the principal is only a victim of frame-up.
Lady Ijeoyibo is an attractive, hardworking woman in her early forties. She complains of unnecessary visits by the locals –“They won’t let me do my job. It’s one person demanding a tour of the premises one day, and another day, it is someone coming on a long-winded courtesy visit” (p. 17).
Things get to a head following the latest visit by Mazi Nyem, the vice-president of the community’s development union. The inability of the school principal to bribe him gets him to gang up with others, most of whom have benefitted from her generosity in the past. It eventually boomerangs.
The second play, Sorters and Sortees, echoes the effects of sorting in our universities. Sorting entails deploying cash or kind by the student to pass an examination. Some students see it as a normal thing, and can get to any level to pass their exams.
Alagbaoso is disenchanted with this development. Thus, this play seeks to expose the parties in the sorting business. It is not only the students who indulge in sorting; some lecturers, too abet it. The play calls on education reformers in the country to tackle this menace so that the value of our degree certificates would be meaningful to not only the holder but employers of labour and the society at large.
Becky and his friends see sorting as an inevitability. The lecturer, Dr Clemento Wise, is a man admired for his straightforward attitude when it comes to teaching, but when it matters most, he falls prey to the riddle of the mini skirt. Prof Jimmy admonishment of the lecturer says it all: “Your punishment will serve as a deterrence to other lecturers and students who have taken sorting as ways of their academic and social lives” (p.96).
Those from the eastern part of the country are familiar with ina-aga. It is a name for a commercial motor cyclist. Popularly called okada in many parts of Nigeria. A humorous television play predicated on the commercial motor cyclist, the playwright x-rays the lifestyle of an ina-aga man. It leaves us with positive and negative lessons to draw from the ina-aga phenomenon.
Not everybody who takes to the business does it deliberately. Chief Ome-aku was hitherto a successful businessman, but when his fortune plummeted, he resorted to ina-aga to make ends meet. But, instead of utilising the money well, he chooses to lavish it on female students working in concert, unknown to him, to milk him dry.
When, at the end, the mystery surrounding the loss of his motorcycle is revealed –he was attacked by a group of student hirelings on the orders of their female colleagues –his wife is disappointed in her husband. 
The play also exposes the corrupt practices of policemen who charge money for bail, among others.
The playwright is also interested in the effects of parental derelictions.
Using Chief and Mrs Maruizu, a respected couple in their community because of the admirable station of life they occupy and their chieftaincy titles, in the play, Armchair Parents, Alagbaoso drums it to our ears that the pursuit of money isn’t supposed to make parents forget their responsibilities at home.
Their son, Victor, dazzles all with highfalutin words at home, but it is merely a smokescreen to cover his academic inadequacies.
The wind is soon taken off his sail when he is exposed by the school authorities for forgery. It turns out to be a rude awakening for the careless parents.
In the last play, The First Day, the playwright revisits the school, this time, a co-educational secondary school, where the fresher, Philip, is given a baptism of fire on his first day at school by his seniors.
Collected Plays 1, with the revision exercises at the end of the plays and its moral contents, will be beneficial to students at all levels, though its homour line can be overstretched sometimes. It is highly recommended.