Earlier today I happened to be shopping at one of the many supermarkets in Nairobi when I came across what seemed to be not only an odd but quite frankly surprising and even hilarious sight. Apparently, every single Kenyan newspaper on sale was either stapled or had a sticker that would ensure you could not peruse it unless you purchased it.

So, as a proud GenXer, the last generation that actually recalls the world before the Internet, I went through the process of consuming traditional media as my main source of all things news and information, all the way to today where social media platforms generally dominate my media consumption habits. As it turns out, pre-Internet, it was perfectly acceptable to pick up a newspaper at a news stand and thumb through a few pages before deciding whether to purchase a copy or not.

Therefore, in what appears to be ‘reverse innovation’, we now see not only paywalls on their digital media channels but also on their traditional media too via staples and stickers! For clarity, in the digital context, a paywall is a digital system that restricts access to digital content, like news articles, requiring users to pay (usually via subscription) or perform an action (like signing up) to view it.

I find this newspaper tactic amusing since as we all know, Millennials, GenZers, and Gen Alphas have no desire or experience of regularly reading traditional newspapers on a daily basis. As a GenXer, I recall a time when we voraciously consumed The Daily Nation, The East African Standard, and The Business Daily in the good old fashioned way – by thumbing through pages as we inhaled the scent of fresh newsprint and paper (to be honest, I miss this form of intoxication!). We even read every page of the classifieds and obituaries sections, just in case there was something of interest there too (yes. true story).

In fact, I can recall quite vividly when we decided to cancel our newspaper subscriptions at my office at the end of 2019 and I personally thought I would lose my sense of ‘grounding’ in the world only to find to my surprise (and delight?) that I did not miss newspapers at all and like my much younger colleagues discovered that social media acted as a very decent proxy for the news I needed to know about on a nearly real-time basis everyday. Ironically, what social media does for me is that it acts as a ‘news discovery’ tool that often points me to articles published on the digital media channels of mainstream media in Kenya and beyond.

Coming back to my discovery this morning of ‘paywalled newspapers’, I’d be very keen to learn who actually buys them and I’d wager that its mostly consumers of the GenX (Nyayo Babies) variety like myself, and the older ‘Boomers’, also known as ‘Uhuruzens’. Collectively, these are Kenya’s generations that have consumed media in the traditional ways for decades and many continue to do so as its habitual and nostalgic for them. Indeed, for many, ‘news is not news’ unless its in print, on radio, or on TV. Digital media channels for them are considered worthy of scrutiny and highly doubtful in an era of relentless misinformation and disinformation.

However, newspapers as we know them continue to struggle to find audiences and uptake in the digital context where the majority of consumers are not willing to pay for subscriptions, at scale. There’s an expectation that news should be free to access and this to a large extent has led to the rise of popular digital-first news media in Kenya such as Tuko and Kenyans which only exist online and have very decent audiences given that they do not have paywalls or the massive costs required to churn out traditional newspapers daily.

Ultimately, the business models for news media in Kenya and globally are struggling to adapt to the massive digital transformation affecting the industry and it seems its going to take radical steps to find what works for the future beyond traditional media channels. Personally, I am a big believer in high quality journalism and news media as consumers and organizations need media that they can trust and rely upon without second guessing its authenticity or accuracy. This is what traditional media houses need to capitalize on in an increasingly digital-first media consumption paradigm in Kenya and beyond.