Ahead of its fifth anniversary lecture scheduled to hold September 28 in Lagos, Publisher and the CEO of Prime Sage International, owners of News Express and Daily Sports Nigeria, Isaac Umunna has described News Express as an online medium with the widest reach. The multiple award-winning journalist also declared that nobody in Nigeria and beyond would be able to avoid his publications in the days to come.
Umunna also stated that online journalism had come to serve as a source of salvation to the problem of unemployment and being owed salaries in places of work.
Speaking exclusively to EveryDay Express in Lagos, Umunna, who has spent three decades in journalism, revealed that decision makers in government, and people on the streets rely on News Express, and that his publication is humbled, though, challenged to do more.
He said: “News Express actually became accepted very fast, and right now, decision makers in politics, business and economy rely on it. The masses also rely on News Express. It is quite humbling. We are taken seriously, from the people in the streets, to government and the Presidency, everywhere you go people believe in News Express. It is a burden, a trust that we are happy to carry.
“We want to expand our reach the more. We hope to improve more in our bulk SMS. Our target is that wherever you are, you cannot do without News Express, and our other publications. It’s either you go to our website directly, or we reach you through e-mail, or we reach you through social media, or through SMS (your phone). Nobody should be able to escape from News Express. That is our goal and mission.”
On what he has achieved so far in terms of traffic to his website, the journalist said: “As we speak, it is one of the most popular and influential newspapers in Nigeria. Right now, we have about one hundred million visits to our website annually, and that is quite massive. We have close to 300,000 people that read News Express all over the world. We have an aggressive circulation of our work. Whatever we publish, we viral it through Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Yahoo communities, Instagram, etc. We also do bulk SMS, and bulk e-mail. We do this aggressively for every story we publish, and this has helped us a lot.”
Describing the contents, Umunna said: “We are a clean paper, we are not a tabloid. It is a serious paper for decision makers. We do not publish junk, we don’t publish nude photos, and we don’t publish dead bodies. These are things that other newspapers can do to get traffic, but we don’t so that; everybody and anybody can read the paper, both young and old.”
