By Olusegun Adeniyi In January 2000, THISDAY moved from a rented property in Ikeja, Lagos to its current corporate headquarters at 35 Creek Road, Apapa. The fully computerised newsroom was a first in the country at the time. We had hardly settled when our Chairman, Prince Nduka Professor (middle name on his birth certificate) Obaigbena, called for a meeting of editors, line editors and reporters.
He handed each of us a very colourful Mac Book laptop and said “from today, nobody writes with longhand in THISDAY. Everybody must type or edit stories personally and send it straight to the planner.” Apart from Waziri Adio who had returned from his Master’s degree programme at Columbia University in the United States with a laptop and Eniola Bello (who had learnt how to type), the rest of us had no clue how to use a computer.
So, the whole idea sounded ridiculous. And we made our views known. Before then, we would pass our handwritten stories to a pool of typists or “computer operators.
” Now that he was insisting everyone would type their own stories, he had effectively cut out that stage of the production process and rendered the typists redundant. Juliana Taiwo (now Mrs Obanloye) was one of those ‘computer operators’ who took the opportunity to go back to school, became a reporter at THISDAY and is currently the State House Correspondent for the SUN Newspaper. But it was a tough decision back then.
Considering that THISDAY was always late to the newsstand at that tim.
