Business Daily failed: Attribution is a journalistic duty, not free advertising

The complaint below from Dr Catherine Masitsa Rozsa, an entrepreneur and Managing Director at Samanthas Bridal, deserves our attention and focus: ‘I am writing to formally request that your office investigate and address a clear case of intellectual property erasure, systematic omission, and editorial misjudgment in a recent Business Daily publication.

On Sunday, October 12, 2026, Business Daily published a feature titled "Women over 50 carve spaces to rediscover themselves" (print and online). The feature was based on an executive gathering where I served as both a founder and keynote speaker.

During this event, I presented my proprietary framework: "Reclaiming and Reinventing Your Patina”, an intellectual concept I developed from observing the pot-aging process in my garden, exploring how maturity, exposure, and lived experience add irreplaceable depth and authority to women leaders.

Intellectual harvesting and collective erasure

While full access and photo consent were granted to your reporter, the published piece represents a stark failure of basic attribution and respect for the women in the room. Every expert speaker and panelist who took the stage to share their lived experiences, insights, and vulnerability was stripped from the narrative. An entire panel of accomplished women leaders was flattened into an anonymous background filler.

All consented photography of our speakers, panelists, and event was discarded and replaced entirely with generic Shutterstock stock imagery. When queried, the writer indicated that editors intentionally stripped speaker names to avoid making the piece sound like "direct marketing" or a press release.

Unattributed intellectual property

The article features a dedicated bold subheading explicitly titled "Embracing her 'patina”, detailing the exact core philosophy and terminology I presented. However, my name, credentials, and status as a founder and keynote speaker were completely stripped from the text. My keynote was reduced to an anonymous line, “ as one of the speakers shared her story”, and the takeaway was attributed solely to an attendee. This framework was not a casual or spontaneous event discussion; it is a proprietary concept I publicly authored, developed, and documented across my platforms prior to this gathering (see attached timestamped posts).

Confusing credentialing expert founders and featured speakers with commercial advertising is an unacceptable editorial practice that poses serious strategic and ethical implications for Nation Media Group. Readers turn to Business Daily for credible, expert-driven insights. Featuring an expert’s coined framework as a story headline while deleting the founder's identity dilutes the quality, authenticity, and authority of NMG’s journalism.

Erasure of Lived Experience: When women over 50 gather to share hard-earned wisdom and lived experience, erasing their identities strips away their authority. Reducing a room of accomplished leaders and panelists to uncredited filler sends a damaging message that mature women's stories are valuable enough to publish, but the women themselves are not worthy of name recognition.

Commercial and market reality

Accomplished, high-net-worth executive women in our 50s and 60s represent the primary core demographic actively purchasing newspapers and subscribing to digital platforms. Erasing the very leaders who drive your readership is a fundamental market miscalculation.

When Kenya’s premier media house harvests our ideas while rendering female founders and leaders invisible, it reinforces the exact erasure mature women fight daily: taking our value while denying us our seat at the table. Attributing original work to the female founders and featured speakers who authored and delivered it is not "free PR”, it is basic journalistic accountability and a moral right of authorship.’

Dr Masitsa seeks a correction of the digital article, crediting her as a founder and the keynote speaker who authored the "Reclaiming Your Patina" framework. Asked to respond to the complaint, the NMG Editorial team defended the article, stating that the journalist and editors exercised independent judgement in determining the news value of the article as per the Editorial Policy.

“The reporter received an invite and contacted Anne Mungai, one of the co-founders of Voice of Heart Africa, and informed her that the story angle would focus on why women over 50 are finding newer spaces to wind down, find friendships, and retreat. The reporter informed her she would interview the founder/organiser and two or three attendees. She sent her questions, then followed up with a recorded phone interview. Anne answered all the questions and never attributed any to her co-founders or referred the reporter to the other founders,” part of the response states.

On the failure to acknowledge speakers, the team notes that a journalist is not necessarily required to name every participant at an event, “especially if the participants have not given consent, because of Data Protection laws”. The team adds that the photographs provided lacked proper documentation to protect Nation Media Group from litigation.

Having reviewed the published article and Dr Masitsa’s concerns and the response of the NMG team, the Public Editor finds that the Business Daily team dropped the ball on many scores.

The first is the failure of the story to answer the all-important question: So what? This is a question that must inform the story’s development from pitching to publishing. Why was it important to cover this event in the first place? What value did it promise the readers? Did it deliver that value?

A reader seeking value from the article would have been more interested in the substance of the conversations, who the speakers were, and what they had to say. The journalist’s duty to inform and educate audiences includes taking them to places and spaces they cannot physically reach. This entails capturing the most important issues from an event or an activity. Why would a journalist sit through an event, only to capture the voice of two participants and the organiser?

Contrary to the assertion that the names and faces of the participants, including the speakers, were removed to avoid making the piece sound like "direct marketing" or a press release, the article actually offers free publicity for the venue and the organiser of the event.

When does editorial independence become intellectual erasure?

Dr Masitsa’s complaint raises questions that extend beyond one article, one reporter or one editorial decision. They go to the heart of how journalism understands attribution, originality and the relationship between editorial independence and intellectual property. Journalism depends on intellectual property more than we sometimes care to acknowledge.

Our currency is original reporting, ideas, analysis, interpretation and the trust of people who share their knowledge and experiences with us. We expect our work to be attributed, our photographs to be credited and our investigations to be protected against unauthorised reproduction. Yet, how consistently do we extend the same respect to the intellectual contributions of others?

Attribution is not advertising

Events can be organised to generate publicity, and speakers may have commercial, professional or institutional agendas. A journalist’s responsibility is to interrogate such material, establish what is newsworthy and produce an independent account rather than reproduce publicity uncritically.

But this responsibility can be misunderstood. Naming the source of an idea is not the same as endorsing that source. Crediting an expert is not the same as advertising their business. And acknowledging a speaker’s intellectual contribution does not require a journalist to surrender editorial independence.

If the fear of appearing promotional becomes a reason to remove the identities of everyone whose contributions inform a story, the newsroom risks creating a peculiar form of journalism; one that retains the value of people’s ideas while withholding recognition of their authorship. That is not editorial independence. It is a failure to distinguish between publicity and provenance.

The people behind the story matter

There is another dimension to this complaint; the omission of all speakers and panellists from the article. Events can be useful settings for journalism, as the editors point out, attendance alone does not make every participant newsworthy. Editors must exercise judgement about whom to quote, whose expertise is relevant and which perspectives advance the story. There is no requirement to name every person in a room or reproduce every contribution made during a discussion.

However, where a story draws substantially on the testimony, expertise or original thinking of identifiable participants, the newsroom should have a defensible editorial reason for how those contributions are represented.

A story about women navigating leadership and reinvention after 50 can easily become a collection of general observations unless it identifies the people whose experiences and ideas give those observations meaning. Removing the names of the people who supplied those insights can diminish the story’s credibility and deprive readers of the context needed to assess their contributions.

The replacement of consented event photographs with generic stock imagery raises a related question. Stock photography is not inherently inappropriate. It may be necessary where suitable original images are unavailable, consent has not been obtained or privacy considerations require another approach.

But when authentic images are available and their use has been agreed, editors should consider what is lost when real participants are replaced by generic representations. The concern is not simply whether particular individuals received publicity. It is whether the published account accurately represents the people, expertise and experiences on which the journalism relies. This is especially consequential when reporting on groups whose contributions have historically received insufficient recognition.

Women over 50, like other groups whose voices can be marginalised, should not find their experiences considered valuable as raw material for a story while their identities and intellectual authority are treated as editorial inconvenience.

Representation is not merely about who appears in a photograph. It is also about whose ideas are recognised, whose voices are heard and who is presented as the source of knowledge.

Contact the Public Editor to raise ethical concerns or request a review of published material. Reach out: Email: [email protected]. Mobile number: 0741978786.