“When the music changes, so does the dance. But in the media, we keep playing the same song — and wondering why we are always doing the same horrible jig.”
I came across that quote, which I have paraphrased, in my wanderings around the universe. It fits to a ‘t’ the state of media in our neighbourhood.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes not from losing something suddenly, but from watching it die slowly while you stood there holding the cure.
That is the grief I feel reading the State of the Media 2025 Report, a rather excellent if troubling piece of work by the Media Council of Kenya. It describes what we knew would happen if we didn’t make the changes we did, then undid and went back to the same, old, terrible tune.
The numbers are not surprising. Shocking but not surprising. They are merely the final accounting of decisions made - and not made, or made and then unmade — over the better part of two decades.
Newspaper readership has collapsed from 29 per cent in 2022 to 13 per cent today. The weekly reach of the Daily Nation and the Standard, according to the report, is a princely four per cent.
Daily television viewership has shed six percentage points compared to 2024, with nearly half of all Kenyans no longer sitting before a linear TV set. What this means is that TV has gallantly followed print out of the plane, without a parachute.
Social media, regarded as vast commons of the intellectually unwashed, is now the primary source of news for 39 per cent of Kenyans — more than television, more than radio, more than anything we previously in the legacy media have built over a century.
Meta platforms – Facebook and Instagram – dominate digital advertising in Kenya.
Photo credit: File | Lionel Bonaventure | AFP
Another quote I saw recently in my wandering around the Milky Way, which I am going to paraphrase with impunity is this: that the struggle for media transformation is long, hard and bloody, won in inches but lost in an instant in the tepid lakes of complacency and ignorance.
Make no mistake, print is in a terminal, irreversible plunge. But that was always in the long run, wasn’t it? That the niche products like the Business Daily and The East African would be even more niche, tightening their content tentacles ever tighter around the specialists who used them in their work and to speak to the like-minded, building a digital-esque community in which membership would become more premium than the content.
The more general print shops, maybe the terms were different, were to be converted into content factories for massive digital engines like Nation.Africa.
I hope, at the end of the day, print will be diminished in reach, but not die in relevance – legitimacy and authority signalling to that corpus of wealthy, older, elite readers.
The internet did not arrive in Kenya as a sudden storm but as a long, visible tide. We saw it coming. We watched it rise around our ankles, then our knees.
We hugged print tight to our chests, telling ourselves that print was different (too lucrative to fail), that Africa was different, our readers were loyal. They were loyal. Loyalty, however, is not a business model.
Nation.Africa, a paid digital subscription product, deserves more credit than it typically receives in these conversations. It was, at the time, one of the pioneering paid digital news products on the continent.
The instinct was correct: that journalism has value, that readers will pay for it, that the future lies not in chasing pageviews but in building a direct, trusted relationship with a paying audience.
The New York Times proved this model could work at scale; Nation.Africa was an early African bet on the same proposition.
It was a step in the right direction. The question is whether it was a step taken soon enough, and boldly enough. The fact that we shut the paywall with $300,000 in subscriptions to refund – merely because it was glitchy and annoyed users, yet we were preachers of the gospel of iteration – answers that question rather eloquently.
Anyway, as a Sh45,000 an hour consultant – albeit one without clients – I can’t volunteer too many opinions, I’d have to charge you for them. But here is the central paradox the report reveals: Kenyans are consuming more news than ever – through social media, WhatsApp forwards, YouTube channels run from someone’s bedroom — yet 63 per cent cannot detect AI-generated content, and 28 per cent cite misinformation as their top concern about media today.
The audience has not abandoned the desire for reliable information. They have simply lost confidence that the institutions built to provide it are still capable of doing so.
That, thank God, is a solvable problem.
Television will not die, it will shrink into a premium, event-driven medium – elections, major sports, live national moments.
The stations that survive will be those that invest in the mother of all appointment viewing: the kind of journalism and programming that demands a live audience. Daily linear viewership is crawling to the cargo door and the empty skies beyond.
The battle for Kenya’s information future is being fought on the smartphone screen where 91 per cent of the folk get their news. And it will be won not by whoever shouts loudest on social media, but by whoever builds the most trusted, most essential digital product for the user.
The question for Kenya’s media houses, even now, is whether they will change the music or render themselves lame with the same old, ugly jig.
