By Isaac Ato MENSAH
Ashaiman – 7 December, 2018.
Magyk Radio in Ashaiman Lebanon organised a formal inauguration of its broadcast on Saturday.
They have been broadcasting solely online for nine months.
They have no frequency allocated from the National Communications Authority and are unregulated otherwise.
‘Our next target after we launch the Magyk App is online TV. We’re getting cameras and a big place,’ Alhaji Ibrahim Tahiru, the Chief Executive Officer told writersghana.com. ‘We’re here to impact the community, to create jobs. We want to be the mouthpiece of the community’.
‘Any political motive?’, I asked him.
‘No. We want to say it as it is. We want to focus on entertainment, the brouhahas and the politics in entertainment’, he said.
Now how is that for a market niche?
There are thousands of young talented musicians and other artistes out there who have been denied access to big media platforms because of the ‘politics in entertainment’ whatever that means.
The Magyk concept brings to mind Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat” in which is discussed small media and also small business competing with big media and big business.
Magyk broadcasts from an eight-mic console on www.magykradioonline.com from a seven-foot-by-five-foot studio.
If you add up the cost of hiring a studio for a recording, why should a newbie in the arts and entertainment industry struggle to lobby popular presenters to give them air time.
And that makes the market challenging for Magyk as well.
But hey, who says they want to capture the whole world.
‘When I came here we had about 1100 listeners according to modernghana.com’, Badwenba Opoku Sefa, the main anchor and station manager told the writersghana.com team.
‘But this figure is only for those who listen in through modernghana.com’, he further said.
Sefa opened his smartphone and proudly showed us that modernghana.com alone was registering 2,334 listeners. The time was 2:25pm.
He then asked us to make simple guesses on minimum numbers of listeners tuning in and being tracked on other online sites.
To be able to consistently maintain an extra 1000 listeners daily on one site alone for a consecutive six months is no mean feat.
‘It’s about the kind of audience, not necessarily the numbers’, my mentor has observed about online content.
For Sefa, the fact that Magyk broadcasts in Twi and has listeners in Europe and North America is enough for them.
‘It’s a business thing we’re doing’, explained JJ, the marketing manager. ‘We have an Islamic broadcast in Hausa. If you have a programme in Ewe and the content is OK, we shall accept it.
He noted that even though Ashaiman is dominated by Ewe speakers, no one has approached them to do anything in Ewe.
JJ who simply wants to hype the brand JJ takes over the console from 7-10pm daily to do freestyle music. From then to the next morning, the team will load music into the computer and leave it on autoplay.
Magyk is daring with their Twi news casting; Odeneho Kofi Tawia, Nana Yaw Asamoah and Piesieh Yaa Dansoaa – the only lady among them, rehearse for 30 minutes to one hour under the direct supervision of Badwenba Sefa and then go on air.
There is nothing put down in writing; not even a written translation.
‘So how do you check for fake news?’, I asked.
‘There are so many news portals and bloggers now sending us stories everyday’, Badwenba Sefa explained. ‘They all want us to download their stories because the mobile network service providers pay them for the number of times a website is opened using their telephone lines.’
Sefa explained that it is a big challenge because he has been added to so many social media platforms which are inundated with links from news portals but they try to use only the credible stories.
All this has provided Piesieh Amfo with useful professional experience. She completed a media school and was sitting at home unemployed before she was given this opportunity.
Amfo’ s seemingly novel career path has been already noticed and documented by media academics as modern technology has disrupted previous knowledge on how media management works.
Leona Achtenhagen writing a guest editorial on media entrepreneurship in the International Journal on Media Management Vol 19, 2017, lists production, marketing and distribution of media products as different activities.
She states among others that graduates of journalism schools are pushed into entrepreneurial careers sometimes as an euphemism for the precarious work careers of freelancers.
These potential career paths are becoming relevant in Ghana as currently media houses are closing down and laying off workers.
On Tuesday, Menzgold Ghana Limited issued a statement asking its workers to go on leave from Monday.
Given the crisis Menzgold has had with its gold dealership and its recent announcement to lay off its workers, are we to expect imminent redundancies at its media houses; Xylophone TV, Xylophone Media and Xylophone FM?
Such a situation will lead to either the creation of a lean workforce soon resulting from more media workers going into entrepreneurship or joblessness.
Xylophone Media has shops in virtually every corner of Accra where artistes go and negotiate to sell their content. Will Xylophone Media be the saviour of Menzgold, its parent company?
We shall continue to monitor the impact of the nascent online media houses on the Ghanaian job market; it promises to be interesting.
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