Buying the News, Not the Paper - An Exploratory Study

This is an exploratory study which describes a pattern of newspaper consumption that gives meaning to an otherwise ordinary activity. It explains a readership behavior which radically enriches and shape human energy into a ‘structured feeling’ of gratified usage of media product. Employing as its discursive unit of analysis, a pattern of communal cultural consumption, its socio-economic implications and the gratifications accruing there from, the paper adopts anecdotal evidence as explanatory cells; arguing that, its findings corroborates the theoretical praxis that cultural consumption functions as a socialization process that recognizes social class formation and the economics of consumption. The paper observes that ‘Buying the News … or read and return’ phenomenon reveals a unique socio-cultural reality of the larger Nigerian environment; concluding that, gender, socio-economic considerations and a rather unique (Nigerian) factor, define activities of ‘buying the news, not the paper’. Key Words: Buying the news, Media-Newspaper consumption, Readership styles, Culture & Class Identity formation, Gratifications, Economy of Cultural Consumption. JCMRJournal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, October 2013, 17–32 ©Delmas Communications Ltd. About the author *Stanley Naribo Ngoa is a Professor of Mass Communication and an Associate, Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Rhodes University/University of Johannesburg, Research Village, Bunting Road Campus, University of Johannesburg, Oakland Park 2006, South Africa. #Acknowledgement: I thank the Head of Department, Marketing, Lagos State Polytechnic, Isolo Campus and the four students of the department who helped to administer the first set of the questionnaire. I also appreciate my students at Covenant University Ota; especially, those in the Mass Communication graduating class of 2012 that enthusiastically helped to administer some of the subsequent 400 copies of the second questionnaire. #Note: This paper was first presented at the Carlton University’s Institute of African Studies Conference, Ottawa, Canada held in May 2013.