What went wrong? Rethinking newsroom leadership in a crisis

By NJOKI CHEGE

It has been a bloody week for the media industry in Kenya. Never in the history of our media has there been such widespread uncertainty and devastation. Journalists have either been laid off, taken pay cuts or continued to work in conditions rife with job insecurity.

The coronavirus pandemic has cost Kenyan journalists more than many of us appreciate. For a profession that takes pride in highlighting the plight of the afflicted, it is ironic that the media industry is slowly morphing into a wounded and disgruntled silent majority.

Everyone is feeling the pinch of the pandemic, you might say. Many Kenyans across different industries have been rendered jobless or forced to live beneath their usual means due to pay reductions. Experts have predicted that some industries will never return to pre-coronavirus levels, and some businesses might never recover.

But the media business is not your average industry. Its success or failure has far-reaching consequences. It affects our democracy, political choices, socio-economic status and the quality of our lives. A failed media is a failing society; a thriving media is a sign of a thriving society. It is for this reason that we must all be collectively worried when journalists across the board continue to pay a heavy price for the pandemic.

Granted, the industry was already in steep decline pre-Covid-19 due to digital disruption. The pandemic has accelerated this decline because it makes little sense for companies to advertise in the middle of a pandemic.

More importantly – and the point I am trying to make in this piece – is that Covid-19 must force us to think differently about leadership and especially crisis preparedness in the Kenyan media industry.

As media leaders scramble to put out fires and stay afloat, now is the time to really look back and reflect on the state of media leadership in our country. Experts at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting company, have written quite a bit advising leaders on how to lead through this crisis. There was a particular report that caught my eye in which they attempted to put together some ‘15 emerging themes for Board and executive teams’ which I found a rather refreshing read. What really caught my eye was theme number seven, where they encourage leaders to ask themselves a very loaded question: “What went wrong?”

As if McKinsey were somehow reading my mind – or perhaps in a moment of sheer coincidence, they give examples of sub-questions that leaders might want to ask themselves in their quest to answer the ‘what went wrong’ question. This particular sub-question I found very relevant to the media today: “…why did we refuse to evolve our business models, although we knew that technology and shifts in societal preferences were forcing us down a treadmill of ever decreasing value-creation potential?”

This question, I reckon, must form the basis of our thinking – or rethinking – about leadership in the context of whatever is happening in today’s media industry. Perhaps this pandemic is a teachable moment for the leadership to make those tough calls about shifting business models, but more importantly, the industry’s preparedness for a crisis of this magnitude.

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The current layoffs of journalists from several media companies have elicited a lot of goodwill messages from fellow journalists, some of whom experienced the same. One journalist remarked that nearly every journalist in the country knows the experience of being laid off and the shock of waking up to a dismissal letter. There was one that I found particularly moving that I felt the need to reiterate here.

To paraphrase, the writer told the journalists that a redundancy letter is not a statement of your abilities or an indictment of them. He said something to the tune of, ‘this rejection is not personal’ and in no way should it define you, your talents or most importantly, your future.

When the noise finally dies down and the messages stop flowing – as they certainly will – I hope the journalists affected will find the strength to rise again, and that they might find comfort in this cliché but very deep quote that ‘a setback is a set up for a comeback.’

The writer is the director of the Innovation Centre at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications. The views expressed in this column are hers; [email protected]