The media industry in the contemporary Nigeria is basically urban centered. This is in contrast t the situation of the industry in the wake of our independence.
The urban centeredness of our media industry has brought with it an imbalance flow of information between the urban and rural areas and verse versa.
In Nigeria, the urban centers are much more enlightened, socially, economically, educationally, politically, through the media. This tilt towards the urban centers uses encouraged by government whose activities over this period have been urban centered, too. Hence in the urban centers, people are more financially bought to buy, television sets, radio sets, newspapers, magazines, journals and the likes in order to acquire knowledge and get themselves with events happing around them.
Given that about 75% of the population re-side in the urban areas and that governments have through their various activities marginalized the rural areas, a greater number of people in the rural areas are poor. Poverty is a living condition in which an entity id faced with economic, social, political, cultural, household, community or nation can be subjected.
The current drive by president Olusegun Obasanjo and his regime to alleviate poverty in Nigeria is a welcome development. But the question that readily comes to mind is whether the programme will be effectively implemented. And more importantly, how could the media play a role in the effective implementation of the programme?
Thus, it is this question of determining what role the media will effectively play in the realization of government alleviation of poverty proramme that has arrested the attention of the researcher, who intend, by x-raying how the media industry, through community journalism in Nigeria will be instrumental in the successful implementation of the above government sponsored programme against poverty.
Community media are vital and effective instrument for informing the rural dwellers because it acts as a link between the government and the grass roots, thereby bridging the communication gulf that had always existed between the two especially in the formulation and implementation of developmental policies.
The earliest form of mass communication namely; town crying was used in the dissemination of information about important ceremonies and events such as inter-tribal wars, disasters, marriages, births, deaths and so on. Even today, town criers are still being used in many villages in Nigeria to communicate vital information to the villages dwellers (Nnanyelugo, 1998:26).
But today, mass communication has assumed another dimension in which both the electronics and print media are Urban centered. In December 1859, Iwe Irohin, the premier newspaper in the country, and the only means of mass dissemination of information or communication, began circulating. Such settlements like Lagos, Calabar, Ibadan, Kano and Sokoto were already enjoying their semi-urban status at least. But by special design, Rev Henry Townsend opted for the rural set-up. According to him, “My objective is to get the people to read it, to get the habit of seeking information by reading.” The motive of the paper was, therefore, to get people to read so as to arouse their awareness, just as any other newspaper today.
The paper combined social, cultural and political commentary with religious reporting with an effort to reach a large number of native readerships throughout Egba land and Yoruba.
As the war continued, he shifted his position and identified himself and his paper with the Egbas, probably to seek political advantage. By doing this, Iwe Irohin involved itself in the first press controversy in the history of Nigerian journalism.
The controversy reped in another paper, the Anglo Africa, established in 1863 in Lagos by Robert Campbell. It opposed Iwe Irohin.
A lot of reasons accounted for the formation of the early press. Among them was the need for African representation in the colonial administrations,
As a result, therefore, each religions in the 1960’s sought and established its own means of dissemination of information to its people clearly along ethnic or parocliol lines.
However, today, the media in Nigeria is an urban affair with over 90% of the country’s mass media located in the urban or cosmopolitan centers of the country. Ironically over 70% of the country’s yeaning populations are rural dwellers. The consequence is that majority the formers, hards men, fishermen, labours, artisans, petty traders and artisans who mainly dwell in the rural areas, are denied the benefit accruing from the derivable from the media, like information, education, enlightenment, entertainment etc.
Hence, the need to reverse the trend. Find doing so it is perhaps now in the economic interest of the media and its operations. By concentrating its location, operation and activities of the urban areas. By concentrating its location, operation and activities of the urban areas, the media creates dispensity and deprivation. First, it makes possible the existence of gulf and not just gap, between the urban and rural inhabitants in the area of development amenities and infrastructural resources.
These necessitated the quest for a change, a reversal which will enable the balancing of the emphasis the media place on human and rural areas.
An ambitions and lofty goal of government is tenable only through determination to succeed through communication policy, through community journalism etc- all directed towards penetrating the rural and far flung country side inhabitants who constitute a programme geared towards reaching the rural dwellers who significantly sustain national economy by feeding the teeming population in the urban cities through agro-based activities, should be encouraged and applauded by all and sundry. Among such programmes could be the enhancement of literacy level of rural communities, creation of awareness and consciousness for development in the sphere of economic, social, cultural, political, and even infrastructural position of government policies and programmes.
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