Thinking Ahead

Editor-in-Chief FOREWORD

It gladdens our heart that since our founding, thedispatch has played a pivotal role in our society.

This is a publication that has positively impacted our generation and will continue to affect our society for years to come.

We thank God that we have established such a strong brand and we must always be proud of that.

Our journalists create stories today that will live long in the memory of our audience. But the story of how we are going to transform our business will also deserve retelling from time to time.

For we stand at an important juncture. In times of disruption, companies can continue with the business model that has served them well in the past, or they can embrace the change and seek to find new opportunities. We are proud to say that thedispatch is adopting a new business model that will transform us to become a big player in the newspaper industry.

It is incumbent on us to rise to the challenges we face and scale greater heights than we ever have done in the past.

Our business will look very different in the future, but always at the heart of it will sit quality journalism.

It is our raison d’etre and the single biggest strength that we have. And it is through that journalism that we give our publics the insights and perspectives that they always have, and will always, seek.

But it is time to evolve our business. We will strive to lead where circulation will be the key determinant of success.

We will join the mainstream newspapers to continue to operate at the forefront of the industry, but we must move at faster speed and free ourselves from the shackles of financial clutches and social media that threaten print journalism. We must accept that the ways things are done in the past are different from the tomorrow’s modus operandi and we must revisit every single one of our assumptions. That’s why we have added advocacy to our duty to our readers and newspaper industry.

Thedispatch will lead in innovative legislative advocacy and new legalism to make newspaper industry sustainable in Nigeria.

We have set a very clear vision to ensure that we win the fight in the 21st century:

 At the heart of the vision sits the need to build communities around the audience that consumes our journalism.

We want to lead the way in building a much closer, more personal relationship with our customers.

Achieving this bold goal will require investment - investment in journalism and investment in technology.

To that end we will create new editorial posts and recruit brilliant, courageous and hardworking journalists. We will also invest in developing the right forums and experiences to connect our audience to our journalists and to each other.

Our strategy, with quality journalism at the heart, is home subscription-first. We must build greater and deeper connections with our customers at scale.

The insights and data we gather on our customers will help us continue to refine and develop the journalism that we offer them.

At the same time the services we provide them under the trusted brand of thedispatch will become much more tailored and sophisticated.

Our commercial businesses will evolve to become more data-led, with customer relationship management at the heart of everything we do. We will continue to develop our offerings in subscriptions, advertising and events, but we will move faster to execute a key pillar of our revenue strategy in consultancy and key programming, particularly events.

We will manage our cost base in traditional areas, ensuring we are sensibly allocating our resources to drive growth in our growth businesses.

We have a wonderful team of people at thedispatch – we have proven our ability to innovate time and time again, and we will continue to do so. We are committed to developing our teams to ensure they deliver the world-class standards that are expected of us. We will also modernise our ways of working as well as significantly improve our work environment.

It is the right thing to do for our business and for society as a whole.

At a time of such profound change, I want us to be clear about what we are and where we are going. Clear to our readers and customers; clear to our partners and clients; and clear to our staff and contributors. Hence this document, the first time thedispatch has explicitly laid down a vision for the future of this company.

It is bold. It is exciting. It requires us to change. But its success will enrich and improve our journalism, grow our audience and secure our future for years to come.