In my dream with Joshua Tigo

Exactly a week from today, your authoritative newspaper The Finder will be one year old and as a result, Marble Communications Group Limited, publishers of The Finder, will be marking that great feet and milestone in its life with a public lecture on Wednesday under the theme: “Strengthening State Institutions for Private Sector Development.” And, as is said of all lives, an unexamined life is not worth living and because The Finder wants to live a worthy life, I want to use this column to examine The Finder’s performance so far even as I celebrate this unique brand. Before I do that, however, let me tell you how I came to be associated with this great family that we now call The Finder Family.
As was the case then, the news of the intention of the former Managing Director of Graphic Communications Group, Mr Ibrahim Mohammed Awal, to establish a newspaper was rife and making the waves, and as someone who had just completed the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) and had completed my National Service in the Enchi District of the Western Region, I made my intentions known to a few friends I thought could help hook me up to the paper when it started.
It was, therefore, with great joy when my friend Manasseh Azure called me one fateful evening to inform me that he had proposed my name to Mr Awal as one of the people who could help in reporting for the yet-to-be-named paper. I waited with bated breath for that call, until one evening when my phone rang. “My name is Emmanuel Amoako, we are coming out with a paper and want to see how you can be part, but let me hand you over to the editor so you can talk him,” the voice on the other side of the phone said. “Is this Mr Joshua Tigo,” the editor asked, and I responded yes. “My name is Kojo Larbi,” he said and paused. I indicated to him that his voice rang a bell in my ears, before telling him that I was available for interactions any time. We subsequently had an eventful meeting and discussion at Afrikiko Gardens in Accra where he indicated to me that preparations for the paper had started for more than a week prior to that meeting. As for the add-ons for me on the day of the meeting only Kojo and I know, and because I do not have his permission to spill it I’ll keep it as a secret.
My long and winding story of how I was recruited into The Finder is a way of telling you how The Finder’s recruitment policy was and has been a policy based on recommendations and careful selection; a policy that was not dependent on who had the best of degrees and classes; a policy that, I believe, has worked well for the company and which has brought us this far. I remember how, in my first meeting at our offices at Asylum Down in Accra, the MD spoke of the need to keep standards and go by our core values of Credibility, Balance, Relevance and Professionalism. I remember how we were all admonished to stand in the middle and not to do the everyday journalism going on in our country where papers had aligned themselves to political parties for whatever reasons.
It is based on these values that I want to look back and take stock and see where there is the need to improve. I remember how as a very young brand people predicted how we were going to be short-lived in the turbulent Ghanaian newspaper market. Manasseh and I know one journalist who told us that there was no way we were going to survive without aligning ourselves to any of the political traditions, and when Manasseh insisted that our vision was diametrically opposed to that tradition, he told him that The Finder would not stand the test of time. Months down the line, the same young man sent me a message on my Facebook asking me to help him get a job at The Finder, a tacit admission of our success stand! The anecdote of this young man I spoke about summarises our largely successful story and shows how we have kept to our core values, something we should be proud of and strive to maintain. It is said that getting to the top is difficult, but staying at the top is most difficult.
But it will also be hypocritical on my side to think that it has been a hundred per cent success without pointing at areas where we need improvement. The Finder, in the last half of its one year, may have been very professional, balanced, credible and very relevant in its delivery, but the same cannot be said of our ‘agenda setting’ role. I remember how our unique role as setters of the agenda has, in the past, given us exclusivity and made our stories the subject of discussion among many Ghanaians. Perhaps, a look at that part of our work will not be too bad even as we look at entering our second year with the hope of greater success.
To the many who have contributed towards this success story and still continue to do so, the advice is simple: once you reach the top, take care as the only way left to go is down, but going down in our case is not an option. There are only two options for us: staying at the top or breaking the sealing. But how can one celebrate without acknowledging the reading and business community whose contributions have helped us to keep our heads above the waters. We salute them! But like Oliver twist, we ask for more.
Ghana and her youth continue to go down the drain because the hitherto reading culture that we had is no more. I have friends who know I am a journalist, but have never seen my by-line (the journalistic term for the writer’s name which appears on top of a news story). But any time I make a TV appearance or granted an interview on radio, my phone is kept busy with calls. We live in a country where people have formed associations such as callers-in to radio stations, with some gaining the tags of serial callers. I am waiting for the day where we shall have serial readers.
The value of a newspaper is worth more than the GH¢1.50 that The Finder sells at, and it is the reason I wish to urge many more Ghanaians to take more interest in reading. As a trained teacher, I can tell you that your child will be better of reading, at least, one story in The Finder than watching a TV programme in the evening.
The Finder is one year old with its values and tagline, “credibility,” intact. Long live Marble Communications Group; long live The Finder; long live the hardworking staff of The Finder and its readers.


Joshua.tigo@gmail.com
“In My Dreams” is weekly column that appears in The Finder Newspaper every Thurday.