APPLICATION OF ICT IN NEWS AGENCY OPERATIONS: NAN EXPERIENCE

PREAMBULE

In the last few decades, information and communication technology (ICT) has increasingly played a critical role in virtually all aspects of human endeavour globally. The media, more than most other fields, have become ICT-driven to the extent that any medium of information which fails to invest in ICT will soon find itself irrelevant.

This is particularly true of news agencies which as a rule must disseminate news items as soon as events occur in order to meet the needs of their subscribers who are mainly newspapers, radio and TV stations.

News agencies operating in advanced countries and some of the emerging economies do not encounter much difficulty in acquiring state of the art ICT equipment which they constantly upgrade to keep abreast of technological advancement and innovations.

This gives them a cutting-edge advantage to play a domineering role in global information flow.

News agencies operating in most African countries, on the other hand, find it difficult to keep afloat with their obsolete technical equipment.

NAN EXPERIENCE

In terms of equipment for news agency operations, NAN has come a long way. Graduating from hand-operated cyclostyling machines, producing hard copy bulletins, to the computer-based Patra system (IPS) and later the Eland system (WANAD).

CURRENT SITUATION

NAN at present utilizes the versatile Transtel News Management for news gathering, processing and transmission. Transtel is based on Windows 2000 and is equipped with the spell-check among other features.

Transtel is run on three processors – the File Server, the Command manager and the News Processor. There is also the SQL Server which has capacity to store news items for 20 years. The Transtel equipment can accommodate 60 workstations, each of them connected to the internet.

After editing news items, editors can transmit same from their workstations to more than 100 subscribers via the satellite equipment made by Astrium.

All the clients are expected to receive the news items simultaneously in their computer-based equipment « neat and clean ».

In the same manner, the Photo editor transmits pictures to the clients from his workstation.

However, NAN 's Transtel system is a simple (one-way) equipment which needs upgrading to a Duplex (two-way) system. NAN also has the HF Radio (DTS) and Barrac which receive news items from correspondents in more than 50 stations within Nigeria into the Transtel system. The internet, intranet and fax machines also come in handy.

DESIRED SITUATION

NAN strongly desires to acquire and install the Virtual Private Network (VPN), touted as the latest technology in news gathering, processing and dissemination. VPN will enable correspondents to file their stories from anywhere, using the laptop. It will gradually replace the intranet, HF Radio, etc.

NAN also plans to upgrade the existing Transtel and Satellite Systems to higher versions.

MEANS

To realise these dreams, NAN intends to invest substantial funds to acquire the needed equipment in the foreseeable future.

NAN also plans to train and retrain its engineers and technologists to be able to handle emerging challenges.

In addition, training of all categories of staff underway, NAN will need to recruit trained and experienced personnel, especially those with ICT bias.
Undoubtedly, all these require enormous financial resources: but then, every unit of currency judiciously utilised toward giving the governments and peoples of Africa better and faster access to information is money well spent.