Media Ownership & Business Environment

Unlike broadcast entities, most newspaper institutions are sole proprietorship, owned and operated by journalists themselves. These practicing journalists often lack the full managerial and business skills to attract huge capital investments and have limited access to loan from banks and lending institutions. Broadcast institutions on the other hand are predominately owned by business people, politicians or partnerships.

Lending procedures in the past has been quite cumbersome and often entrenched in bureaucratic malaise. Where opportunities existed, requirements were colossal and rules stringent, preventing small businesses from accessing these facilities. To develop, the print and broadcast industries require solid investment to address a number of business expansion opportunities.

In a random interview with two commercial banks, LMC was told that lending opportunities existed for small businesses but when asked whether media institutions were taking advantage, the banks reserved answers.

Proliferation Versus Sustainability

Foremost of the problem facing the media industry is sustainability. While capital infusion could bolster the industry, it is poised to make nominal impact if underlying market issues are unresolved. The print media community is severely under-resourced but the growing rise in tabloids has even further narrowed the market. The advertisement market on which the industry strives is relatively small and in often cases, scrambling for advert has denied the industry the real market value of their pages, leaving advertisers to ultimately determine and impose prices.

A more compact industry could effectively deal with this kind of situation and promote an economically healthier and productive competition, hence the need for a market survey aimed at developing supplementary services to media including advertisement. Credible information from some radio stations suggests that a number of cellular phone companies in the country were fixing advertising prices for the media outlets. The advertisers had threatened to deal with medium holding larger coverage if smaller radio stations were refusing the offer.

A combined price proposal from the stations was reportedly rejected, resulting to individual stations submitting compromised price lists. Most electronic media institutions concurred that proliferation of media institutions is affecting unity of purpose. All of these developments accentuate the need for the creation of a more compact landscape.

True, a plural media system favors democracy but proliferation should be seen as a public good only when institutions are growing and flourishing. There’s apprehension in certain quarters that the media growth is unparallel to development. Media institutions are not expanding; contents are relatively the same with conditions of media employees significantly unchanged because turnovers have also not improved. Generally, there is a relatively high attrition of professional media personnel to other sectors of higher earnings.

This explains the low percentage of university graduates working with media institutions in Liberia today. In a recent study released by the LMC, just 19.6 % of all media workers in the print sector (editors, reporters, managers, accountants, business managers etc) from about nine print institutions are college graduates, whilst 9.0% of the 199 staff of seven electronic media institutions researched were college graduates.

About roughly 31.4% of the print media workers held secondary school diplomas, whilst 12.1 % in the broadcast sector had similar level of education. An impressive 46.6% of print media personnel were in college, while 34.2 % of broadcast media workers were also in college showing a promising incremental growth in professional personnel.

Two thirds (2/3) of the newspapers surveyed lacked mobile telephony in their offices; while only one did not have a local television channel. Only two of the nine papers had a cable TV service. All of them possessed computers – the least being 3 and the most being 15. On the average the papers owned between them about 6 computers each. Only 2 of the 9 papers lacked internet facilities.

Only one paper did not have circulation in at least 2 locations outside Monrovia. Two of them were even circulated in 6 or 7 other places outside Monrovia. And all of these papers had anywhere from 1 to 7 correspondents assigned to cover other parts of the country. And the circulation strengths of the two newspapers that operated in the country prior to the beginning of the civil conflict in 1990 (Daily Observer and the News), experienced a sharp decline in their circulation since then.

Only one of the electronic media institutions surveyed lacked mobile telephony in their offices; while only 2 of the 5 radio stations did not have a local television channel. Only one of the seven institutions lacked a cable TV service. All of them had computers – the least been 4 and the most being 21. Only 1 of the 7 institutions lacked internet facilities. Most of these stations have no coverage or reach outside the Monrovia area.