Yemisi Izuora
Newsrooms, especially in Africa, must quickly transition to strategic knowledge creation to survive the disruption from the fast-coming zero-click era.
Dr Maxwell Amuchie, publisher and CEO of the Sundiata Post Media Ltd, said this at the training session, Day-One of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP), Annual Conference, held at the Radisson Blu in Ikeja Lagos, Wednesday morning.
He stated that mainstream media will remain relevant but media houses must become dynamic and adaptive to change, to survive the emerging trends and threats.
Amuchie, who is also a theorist and lead researcher at Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU), Abuja, said newsrooms will continue to report, they will continue to publish, they will continue to distribute, but they must also conduct relevant research.
His presentation is titled, “The Sundiata Post Model: Building The African Newsroom For The Long Term.”.
“It (newsroom) must analyse, it must develop knowledge, it must preserve knowledge, it must create intellectual capital, and it must build institutional assets that become more valuable over time,” he stated.
Dr Amuchie traced the evolution of media consumption and marketing, showing how digital journalism disrupted hard copy news, how social media, and more recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting online journalism.
He said AI makes it possible for someone to see all your work without going to your site. “So, what do we do to retain value as publishers and media content experts? What will advertisers use to assess you and give you a business? How do you create value to be relevant?”
The presenter said tech will continue to evolve, but mainstream media’s mission (which is publishing) will remain a permanent feature. He emphasised that analysis is the key. “Explain the convergence of forces. Create frameworks to do your work. It may soon not matter whether anybody comes to your website”, he stressed.
He gave what he called seven pillars of the zero-click era survival but said they are interlinked. He called them assets, which he named as trust, authority, knowledge, intellectual capital, institutional memory, and original research. Others include proprietary frameworks, archives, relationships, and reputation, all aimed at getting people to your website.
The essence, he said, is that people could read you without clicking to your website, and it is visiting one’s website that attracts adverts. He sought to teach what publishers and mediapreneurs needed to do to attract revenue without relying on visits and clicks to their websites.
He referred the online publishers to a research report in 2025 published in April 2026 by the ‘SquirrelPR RANKED Report’ which he said showed a sharp decline in audience traffic across Nigeria’s digital media ecosystem.
He said the decline was reported at 26.2 per cent — from more than one billion visits to approximately 769 million visits.
The solution, he counseled is that the newsroom must evolve from being primarily a content-production organisation into a knowledge-producing institution. “This does not mean abandoning journalism”, Amuchie added.
Earlier in his welcome address to the large gathering of members, the GOCOP President, Danlami Nmodu (mni), said the training sessions held on the first day of this year’s conference are designed to inspire members to recognise the potentials they carry within them.
He said GOCOP which already has highly respected intellectuals and successful editors can still produce nationally and globally recognised personalities such as professors, CEOs, even presidents. “We have latent qualities that can move the society”, he opined.
He advised members to begin to consider specialisation in order for their publications to be recognised as leading lights in various sectors as well as further project GOCOP.
The President paid glowing tribute to a former president of GOCOP and founder of Eagle Online, the late Dotun Oladipo. He described the late publisher as a strong pillar of GOCOP’s and a friend to all. Members had earlier observed a moment-of- silence in his honour.