Well done, Observer. Now we all must sign a new social contract with citizens

The Observer newspaper recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, making it the second-longest running mainstream independent newspaper after the Monitor.

It is remarkable that the paper has been able to stay afloat for so long. It is also worth reflecting upon ahead of World Press Freedom Day tomorrow.

The journalists and editors that left the Monitor  to found the Observer in early 2004 were only following a tradition that the founders of this newspaper, led by Wafula Oguttu, had themselves started when they left the Weekly Topic  in 1992.

Three years later a batch of 10 younger, restless and ambitious journalists led by Onapito Ekomoloit did a ‘Monitor’ on the Monitor  and left to start The Crusader, a plucky weekly newspaper.

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The show didn’t last long; when Greenland Bank was shuttered on April Fool’s Day in 1999 it went down with many of its customers, including what was left of what had been a feisty lil fighter of a paper.

But it was an accident waiting to happen. Repressive laws and actions by state agents were a constant occupational hazard. The small size of the economy and, by extension, miniscule middle class ensured low demand for good journalism, culture and the arts. In addition, buccaneering journalists rowing away from the Mother Ship focused a lot on the product and very little on the process and the boring but necessary bean-counting and collecting.

In fact it is arguable that had Nation Media Group not swooped in to buy Monitor  a year later it, too, might have joined The Crusader  in the cemetery – for business reasons, not journalistic ones.

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Led by Kevin Aliro, who had been booted out of The Monitor  unceremoniously just a few months earlier, the team that left to start The Observer added a sense of defiance to an established culture of media enterprise.

The paper also benefitted from widespread goodwill, including from many who chose to support it quietly, and from a dynamic news environment that saw the death of Milton Obote, the return of Kizza Besigye from exile, and the first multiparty election in 2006.

Yet it is a miracle that The Observer  has made it this far. Aliro’s death less than two years after the paper was started robbed it of its dynamo, visionary and rainmaker. Subsequently many of its leading lights wandered off to pursue different interests. Lindah Nabusayi Wamboka went to work for President Museveni, Ssemuju Ibrahim Nganda went to Parliament, and James Tumusiime went into corporate public affairs.

Even the second layer of talent has been depleted with the departures of Herbert Benon Oluka and Richard Kavuma, both excellent editors of the paper.

Smaller newspapers like The Observer and The Crusader before it play at least two important roles, for which they hardly get any credit. First, they are a good training ground for journalistic talent that would otherwise be crowded out of the bigger and more territorial newsrooms. For instance, your columnist cut his adult teeth at The Crusader as did many others, including Felix Osike now holding the reins at Vision Group and Ras, who remains an institution in the cartoon world.

Many of my NMG newsroom colleagues, including Robert Madoi who edits our weekend papers, earned their stripes at The Observer. No university course can reproduce this real-world training, or the tight-knit camaraderie found in small newsrooms.

Secondly, they also check the dominant narrative of the major media houses by providing an avenue to publish alternative takes and theses. Without this pressure valve, mainstream media houses can easily become co-opted into the dominant and self-serving political economy.

I do not know how much longer The Observer can hold out in an industry lurching through rapid and existential disruption to the underlying business models, and which is affecting even the majors. But I certainly hope that it, and other small plucky media outlets can find a way to keep the doors open.

Ironically, that disruption has removed many of the barriers that previously kept would-be media entrepreneurs at bay. The power packed in printing presses and massive terrestrial transmitters can now be unboxed in simple mobile phone boxes with internet connections.

The challenge is no longer how to get in, but how to stay relevant – and particularly how to stay in journalism that serves the public interest. The next generation media houses will have to combine the courage of breaking out, ride the disruptive wave of innovation, and anchor themselves to citizens and their information needs.

Citizens, too, have roles to play. They should be willing not just to pay for the media they consume, but to hold us journalists accountable for the work that we do. This new social contract – pay your content provider directly and ask for a receipt – is the future of journalism.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
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X: @Kalinaki