NMG registers 150 proposals on media sustainability
KAMPALA- The Innovations Village says it has received 150 proposals from individuals and companies offering ideas on the new ways the Nation Media Group (NMG) media can engage and serve its customers better.
The Innovations Village chief executive officer, Mr Japeth Kawanguzi, said yesterday they had received 150 proposals from individuals and companies offering solutions to challenges the Nation Media Group gave them to engage and understand their customers so that they can serve them better.
“NMG gave us challenges in their areas of interest. The Innovations Village builds and manages the environment for NMG to work together with innovators to scale the new ideas to improve circulation, consumption of the NMG content, engagement with audiences and consumers,” he said.
Last week, NMG launched the Future of the Media campaign. The campaign aims to solicit ideas from individuals and institutions that can help media group Ugandan outlets to engage and understand its audiences better.
All the proposals will be evaluated on how they improve the news content and the revenue streams.
The best proposals will be subjected to a boot camp to polish the ideas and bring them to fruition.
Mr Joseph Beyanga, the chairperson of NMG innovations committee, said the campaign was scheduled to start in January but it was rescheduled to March before it was again disrupted by the Covid-19 outbreak.
He explained that while the number of people consuming news has grown, the newspaper copy sales have dropped.
Mr Beyanga said all the Nation Media Group Uganda online platforms, have millions of consumers on KFM and Dembe FM radios, NTV, The Daily Monitor, Spark TV, and Enyanda social media platforms.
He said there is need to strengthen and understand the consumers better because providing them good content is expensive and yet the revenue from it is too low.
“We need to be flexible. The customers are changing but our business is not changing, meaning we have to find new ways of serving our customers,” he said.
Mr Tony Glencross, the managing director NMG Uganda, explained that the project they have embarked on is aimed at finding new ways of doing business by moving away from the analogue methods to new ways of delivering the news content, which requires new business models for future generations.
“We believe that media information and content will remain the same. When you think about innovations, it isn’t about new things but new ways of doing things. The youth of today are not traditional media consumers, but consumers of the future generation,” he said.
He added that while the newspaper is getting smaller, the content remains the same.
He said it is important to get ideas from the youth to understand the channels through which they enjoy consuming NMG products, citing television in the Western world where studies show that whereas children spend five hours on television a day, most of their content is consumed on phone and such information is important for moving from the analogue business model to the digital.
