Mass Communicatiin

With over a million users in the country, making it the third most active African country on Twitter, Twitter is growing in importance in the Nigerian, as its existence in the nation’s media landscape cannot be ignored. Today, most media outlets now have a presence on it with a feed directing audience to their respective sites. More than ever, the digital generations in Nigerian are now using it to learn about what’s happening in the world. It is against this backdrop that this study surveyed select audiences in Ilorin by purposively sampling 300 respondents in Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria to assess their uses, awareness, preference and acceptability of Twitter as a news source. The study revealed that 85.3% of audiences are aware of Twitter as a news source and 93.2% of those who are aware of this novel source of news have received such news. Nonetheless, 79.9% of respondent still prefer to get their news via traditional mass media than on Twitter. This could indicate that despite the increasing role played by Twitter in the Nigerian media environment, some audiences are yet to fully embrace this social media as a news source. Hence, ways of encouraging audiences in Ilorin to embrace Twitter as a news source should be devised.

The popularity of mobile phones in Nigeria makes it an important medium for delivering information. More than 99 million people use the mobile phone, which is more than half the population of the country. Most of these people will increasingly receive information, news and other media content in form of text messages through their mobile phones. A significant number of these populations are youths majority whom are students. Unfortunately, most use this service for interpersonal communication alone rather than receive political news.  Thus, against the backdrop of previous research findings that the application of text messages is increasing as a means of communication in Nigeria, this research assessed the use and acceptability of text messages as a channel of political news dissemination to students in Zaria and Ilorin. Thus, selected students were surveyed and a questionnaire was used to elicit responses from a sample of 291 from the two towns. Using the simple percentage for analysis, findings revealed that text messages as a means of disseminating political news to students was acceptable and will succeed if adopted by traditional mass media houses.

The emergence of newspapers as a medium of Mass communication in what is now known as Nigeria can be traced to as far back as 1859 with the publication of the first newspaper; Iwe Irohin fun Awon Ara Egba ati Yoruba’ (A Newspaper for the Egbas and Yoruba People), by Reverend Henry Townsend, an Anglical missionary. This newspaper and a number of other indigenous language publications of its kind actually predates the official existence of the country, Nigeria; a British colony which came into being through the amalgamation of its northern and southern protectorates in 1914.With this pioneering arrival of such indigenous language publications, it would logically be expected that over the years, such newspapers would have grown to become well established institutions in the Nigerian newspaper industry. Yet, today, after over a decade from the establishment of the first newspaper; incidentally an indigenous language publication, many indigenous language publications in Nigeria are still faced with problems of irregularity while some are not even known. Many others have also gone extinct. In fact, today’s Nigerian newspaper industry has the publications in English language as the mainstream newspapers while the few published in local languages are more or less supplements. This paper examines the trends and challenges of indigenous language press in Nigeria from 1914 to date. The paper recognizes the importance of indigenous language in effective communication and highlights the prospects of indigenous language press in today’s Nigeria.

A number of scholars in the last two decades have emphasized the centrality of the indigenous African languages to any discussion on development particularly in Africa. The importance of language as a fundamental element of human communication is indeed beyond dispute. In the case of mass mediated messages, the media’s powers of shaping the people’s perception of reality on issues bordering on national security and sustainable development in general can obviously not be achieved without the use of language. While scholars generally agree on the fact that the media are useful vehicles in promoting development, one issue which remains unresolved however is that of “what roles are assigned to which language in the media”. This is especially as the logic of administrative convenience clashes with the logic of linguistic diversity. In a multilingual society such as Nigeria, indigenous languages are an important tool capable of empowering and mobilizing large sections of the populace, particularly those who are not literate in English, which serves as the official language of many Nigerian media organizations. With the present state of insecurity in the nation, no group of people, whether literate or non-literate, should be denied access to vital issues related to security and development. This paper seeks to bring to the fore the imperative of promoting indigenous languages in  media content with a view to exploring the links between indigenous language, communication for development and mass mobilization on issues of national security.

This article examined the exploratory data analysis on social media and youth online political participation in Nigeria and Malaysia. Specifically the data screening procedures and preliminary analysis of the data collected were explored. A total of 369 Nigerian undergraduates of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and Malaysian undergraduates of Universiti Utara Malaysia completed a self-administered questionnaire on a 7-point semantic differential scale with bipolar adjectives as anchors. The data collected was analyzed using Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) application software version 18. To fulfil the requirement for a multivariate analysis, response bias, missing values, outliers, normality and multi-collinearity test were conducted and the results indicated that the data for the study were fit and could be used for further multivariate analysis.