BY OLALERE FAGBOLA
WHENEVER it comes to dealing with burning issues of high public interest especially in reacting to (instead of responding to) issue of change, too many human chickens are always fond of snapping at each other’s intestines, (for survival) either in the political, religious or in the business circle .
Sad enough, most of them (in their attitudes to change) are not given to addressing the heart of the very matter.
Take it or leave it, there is a newly redefined publisher and writer relationship, particularly in this post-COVID 19-information era in which the changing readers themselves have continued to change again and again.
As things stand, it is not advisable for any of us, nay the publisher, to get into the way of the fast-changing and fast-moving lane of the super information revolution train now sweeping all over the universe lest one be crushed beyond redemption.
We cannot even calm down the revolution. We cannot risk its ultimatum or come in the way of its anger. We can only do ourselves a favour by anticipating it or keying into its constitution. The only tribute to pay the change revolution is to embrace it or lead its way, lest one is dragged and bruised on its crazy lane like the proverbial tap root tangling in the way of an “ajanaku” who ferrets like a “ firi nidi-oke,already “destined to climb “oke-odo” with all its ferocity .
Dear publisher, you are finding a stiff cut-throat competitor in your savvy (sabi) generation writer amid new software editing machine, generating images and arranging them with the speed of lightning.
What Then Is The Way Forward?
First admit that you are an illiterate and that you are better for it enrolling in the school of Alvin Foffler, who says you are a candidate billed “ to learn, unlearn and relearn”
Hence, the publisher would do well to go along with his editor that we are now in the walless classroom and newsroom where the era of Bossism is dead and gone, even as leadership in the writing or in the media world is no longer determined by the largeness of the office space one occupies but by how relevant is your role in providing solution and bringing food to table.
Now wait for the shocker! The days when editors sit down to hire and fire reporters are going rapidly if not gone already. Today, reporters who are closest to facts and who “take change for breakfast “ are hiring and firing editors, for they are in the right position to know the ideal, respectable and respected editor who is best to lead out the real thing inside of them and raise the standard.
If only the crack publisher would play the game with intelligence and large-heartedness, he may of course have the last card and play the final joker by allowing the writer or reporter to prove his mettle to dish out best-sellerdom, seasonless scripts as well as writings which continue to dazzle plagiarists who do not know when next your new edition is going to catch them pant down. If you are however safe in the book industry, the writer must be ready to produce material which thunder goes beyond the launching halls, (if not avoiding it like a plague)
And since “conviviality is an incentive to gallantry, the ideal publisher who knows his onion and knows how to take it must be prepared to partner with, co-respond and give advance royalty to the crack team if he must lead the race”.
Who is asking the publisher to take the dosage hook, line and sinker?
Not when all the bills must pay by themselves. So he must challenge the very best out of the writer or the reporter to prove his mettle, for we are in the days of the proverbial bourgeois writer who shows himself, eminently presentable but is all soggy and wormy inside.
