THE ART OF REGURGITATING NEWS: WHEN ELECTRONIC MEDIA LAG BEHIND NEWSPAPERS

"Dear TV editors, repeating a story that I read in the Sunday Nation is not news." A terse and sharp rebuke from a fellow Kenyan journalist, which perhaps indicates how regurgitating news, often times, has become an art perfected. 

The Sunday Nation newspaper story in focus, was a damning indictment of the country's embattled Water minister, bordering on outright nepotism, when it came to awarding her ministry's lucrative tenders.

Electronic media outlets were beaten to that story by the newspaper and probably not unexpectedly, they immediately jumped on it, hoping to not only make up ground, but also take it forward and break any new angles that day, before the papers take their publications to bed.

Unfortunately, that was not to be, mainly because no media outlet succeeded in getting a response from the minister in question, it being a Sunday, among other reasons.

So anyone tuning in to catch the news that evening and who also had read the day's Sunday Nation, would have rightly wondered why TV stations were screening stale information packaged as news.

As pointed out by the observant journalist, it is even more shameful that the newspaper story was being reproduced word for word, in some instances, for the evening bulletin story.

It however goes to show that the prophets of doom, as far as the future of newspapers is concerned, ought to be a bit more optimistic. I mean, just look at how the Vatican newspaper's story of Pope Benedict's views on using condoms, sent the entire global media into a spin, print, electronic, online, mobile et al.