A publisher and CEO of the Sundiata Post Media Ltd, Dr Maxwell Amuchie, has canvassed the need for newsrooms, especially in Africa, to quickly transit to strategic knowledge creation to survive the disruption from the rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted news reporting era.
The expert gave the charge at the training session, Day-One of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) Annual Conference held on Wednesday in Ikeja Lagos, Wednesday morning.
Amuchie maintained that mainstream media would continue to remain relevant in the new era but advised print and online media publishers to become dynamic and adaptive to change in order to survive the emerging trends and threats.
Amuchie, who is also a theorist and lead researcher at Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU), Abuja, said newsrooms would continue to report, publish, and distribute, stressing that but they must also conduct relevant research.
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He expatiated: “It (newsroom) must analyse, it must develop knowledge, it must preserve knowledge, it must create intellectual capital, and it must build institutional assets that become more valuable over time.”
Amuchie traced the evolution of the media consumption and marketing, showing how digital journalism disrupted hard copy news, how social media, and more recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting online journalism.
He said AI can enable someone to see all his works without going to the site,quipping that “so, what do we do to retain value as publishers and media content experts? What will advertisers use to assess you and give you a business? How do you create value to be relevant?”
The presenter said technology would continue to evolve, but mainstream media’s mission will remain a permanent feature, stressing that analysis is the key that “explain the convergence of forces. Create frameworks to do your work. It may soon not matter whether anybody comes to your website.”
He listed the seven pillars of the zero-click era survival as including trust, authority, knowledge, intellectual capital, institutional memory, and original research. Others include proprietary frameworks, archives, relationships, and reputation, all aimed at getting people to an online publisher’s website.
According to him, the essence is that people could read you without clicking to your website, and it is visiting one’s website that attracts adverts.
He referred the online publishers to a research report in 2025 published in April 2026 by the ‘SquirrelPR RANKED Report’, which showed a sharp decline in audience traffic across Nigeria’s digital media ecosystem.
He said the decline was reported at 26.2 per cent — from more than one billion visits to approximately 769 million visits.
To address the challenge, the online publisher advised that the newsroom must evolve from being primarily a content-production organisation into a knowledge-producing institution, adding that “this does not mean abandoning journalism.”
Earlier in his welcome address to the large gathering of members, the GOCOP President, Danlami Nmodu, said the training sessions held on the first day of this year’s conference are designed to inspire members to recognise the potentials they carry within them.
He said GOCOP which already has highly respected intellectuals and successful editors can still produce nationally and globally recognised personalities such as professors, CEOs, even presidents. “We have latent qualities that can move the society”, he opined.
He advised members to begin to consider specialisation in order for their publications to be recognised as leading lights in various sectors as well as further project GOCOP.
