Responding to the dramatic increase in mobile telephone use in Nigeria, The Punch, the country’s leading newspaper, will launch the country’s first full mobile news service this month. “In 1999 there were 400,000 mobile telephone users in Nigeria. This year’s figure is about 40 million,” said Azubuike Ishiekwene, executive director of publications at Punch Nigeria Limited to RAP 21.

“The growth of mobile phones is quite remarkable and we want to tap into that market, especially for the young users of our products and services,” he said. The Punch will be the first newspaper to fully exploit the burgeoning platform of mobile telephones in Nigeria.

The relevance of The Punch’s new service is confirmed by a May 2008 United Nations News Centre report, which states that over the past three years Africa has had the fastest-growing cell phone market in the world. Moreover, this market appears to be growing at a constant rate, dissimilar to Internet trends where only three percent of the population is online in sub-Saharan Africa.

News disseminated through mobile phones from 6 in the morning until midnight will give The Punch a new and better way to circumvent infrastructure that makes it difficult to reach people across the country. Currently, the print edition is mainly read by urban populations. Mobile phone users are also concentrated in urban areas, however Ishiekwene said, “mobile phone use has also gone into the hinterland and villages. There is a real possibility of reaching a far broader audience.”

“What is rather popular amongst newspapers in Nigeria at the moment, especially national newspapers, is what you call the national alert. When a piece of news breaks paper sends it through the mobile platform, but all you get is the headline,” said Ishiekwene. The Punch is going to take this idea further and provide a full news service through the mobile phones. Readers will be able to subscribe to the service through The Punch’s online edition.

“You would actually be able to read the newspaper on your mobile phone. The formatting would be different than a text message and it would be easy to navigate with a design for mobile phones,” said Ishiekwene and added that statistics indicate that many mobile phone users are WAP (wireless application protocol) equipped to support the service.

The new mobile service has also led to changes within the newsroom at The Punch. Some staff members have been retrained, a couple of new employees have been hired and some tasks have been outsourced to the computer support company that is providing the mobile service.

As the paper embraces this new service, Ishiekwene is preparing to make the shift to an integrated multimedia newsroom and as was said in the World Editors Forum publication Trends in the Newsroom 2008 “in the effort to join print and online, mobile just might end up being the glue.”