By Abolaji Adebayo

The Editor-in-Chief of Leadership Newspaper, Mr. Azu Ishiekwene, has charged media enterprises to embrace innovation for optimal performance to be more relevant in the fast changing ecosystem.

Speaking while lecturing the fellows of MTN MIP-4 Cohort, the Editor noted that the realm is changing and the media have to follow the trend especially as technologies continue to emerge and dominate every aspect of human life.

He noted that despite campaigning on innovation across sector, most media establishments do not embrace innovation for themselves.

He said while many associate innovation to technology, media innovation is different as it encompasses the entire workforce, production process and operation system.

According to him, innovation is mostly defined as the “process of creating and implementing new ideas,” yet the most effective innovation is to “stop doing things that do not enhance efficiency and effectiveness.”

Quoting Kelvin Anderson, an American former professional football player, Ishiekwene said: “To create the space for innovation and the opportunity for growth, companies at every scale and every stage from start-up to striped legacy media must decide not only what to do, but also what they will stop doing so that they can focus on editorial and commercial innovation – not simply for the sake of doing something new but to achieve their journalistic mission and their editorial ambitions in a constantly changing media environment.”

The media expert therefore charged enumerated some things media leaders and managements would stop doing in 2025 to optimise their performances.

According to him, the media managers should minimise undifferentiated or commoditised news contents and allow innovation in their media contents, rebrand their editorial processes, promote the patterns that reward conformity, do away with the old structures that silo editorial, commercial, and technological functions, hence, every media workers should be trained to function in every aspect of the media productions.

Above all, he urged the media houses to set up metrics through which the individual and collective successes could ve measured periodically to create room for improvements.

He further charged media establishments to encourage training among their staffs including in-house, local and foreign trainings.