Preliminary research phase .1 Desk research .1 Desk research

The preliminary stage of the fieldwork lasted for two months and was dedicated to gathering secondary data from available sources. Since new media work is a nascent occupational field in Nigeria and one which operates mostly in the informal economy, there were no official statistics about it from national and regional databases and surveys¹¹. For this reason, I had to rely on data available from manual internet searches for new media companies in Nigeria. Inevitably, search results directed me to the websites of companies which claimed to specialize in new media work such as web design and animation. To augment these findings, I made use of my personal database of friends and professional contacts to generate obtain further information about new media companies.

11 Since I was aware of this before going to the field, I had made attempts to participate in a mapping of the creative industries in Nigeria with the British Council and its partners. This mapping would have included the new media industries but did not take place eventually.

The information gathered through this method provided me with useful data about the most prominent new media companies in Lagos and the fields they specialized in.

Since this information was obtained from company websites, it was difficult to ascertain the size of these firms. In the end, the list comprised a total of 32 companies all based primarily in Lagos apart from one which had operations in Ibadan (a city about 100 km away from Lagos). A summary of the list is shown in the table below.

Total number of companies 32

Fields of

specialization

Web design 23

Web marketing/advertising 16 Mobile app development 5

Animation 4

Online/mobile games 3

Offline multimedia 2

Table 4: List of companies gathered during desk research

It is worth noting that 15 of the companies in the list claimed on their websites to have more than one specialization. For example, some of those involved in web design work also claimed that they did web marketing while others stated they were involved in mobile application development. Also, within fields such as web design, web marketing and animation, there were sub-fields such as e-commerce, social media and 2D animation respectively, which companies variedly specialized in. A full breakdown of the list is available in the appendix. This list formed the basis of selecting participants for the focus group sessions which I describe next.

4.2.3.2 Focus groups

For the next step in my fieldwork, I organized two focus group sessions with owners and managers of new media companies. As mentioned above, the list of participants for the focus groups was derived from the data gathered during the desk research. As a

way to encourage people to participate in the focus groups, I organized a workshop titled ‗e-Merging Media in Nigeria: Culture, Content, Context‘ which was aimed at discussing issues related to the development of the new media industry in Nigeria.

Thereafter I went about inviting the owners and managers of the companies in my list to the workshop.

The workshop was organized under the auspices of a Centre for Creative Industries Development and Research (CINDER) which I had established at the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University¹². One of the key attractions of the workshop was that it was to be held at this University which, as indicated earlier, is one of the most prestigious in Lagos. The workshop was publicized through the Centre‘s website using a mechanism that sent personalized emails to as many new media companies in the list as possible¹³. The emails directed recipients to the workshop‘s web page which included a personalized registration form. During this process, phone calls were made and subsequent emails were sent to encourage more people to register. Since contact details or email addresses were not obtainable for all the companies in the list, I adopting a snowballing approach as a way to reach more people. In this approach, the registration forms were designed to include fields that allowed registrants to suggest other new media companies by providing the email addresses of other companies they thought would be willing to attend the workshop. In the end, there were a total of 22 registrations from 33 invited companies.

The workshop was held on October 30, 2012 at the campus of the Pan-Atlantic University situated at 2, Ahmed Onibudo Street, Victoria Island, Lagos. Attendance was free to the participants including lunch and tea served at break periods¹⁴. There were three plenary sessions during the workshop which had different themes as follows:

12 At the time of my research, the university was called ‗Pan-African University‘.

13 The email addresses were obtained from the websites of the companies.

14 The costs for the workshop were borne by the university

1. The Nigerian economic environment and the opportunities for the new media industry (presented by Dr. Doyin Salami of the Lagos Business School)

2. Technology at the service of social innovation in the Nigerian environment (presented by Mr. Tunji Eleso, co-founder of Co-Creation Hub, Lagos¹⁵)

3. Managing growth and global expectations in the local environment (presented by Chukwuemeka Afigbo, a Program Manager at Google Nigeria)

Since the speakers were experts in their topics, the workshop provided the participants with helpful knowledge and ideas about the themes covered. For me, the workshop was a good opportunity to engage with the participants individually. More crucially, it served as the ideal platform for conducting the focus groups and gain more insight into the new media industries in Nigeria.

There were 16 people in total who attended the workshop from 13 different new media companies. There were two focus groups which were held in-between the three plenary sessions of the workshop. Participants were split into two groups for breakout sessions after each of the first two plenary sessions: one group was led by a colleague of mine, Lami Attah, while I led the second. Focus groups were conducted during my breakout sessions, with 8 participants in each group. The participants had been previously informed that these breakout sessions would serve as forums for discussing the themes of the workshop as well as other concerns related specifically to the new media industry in Nigeria. In other words, the term ‗focus groups‘ was not explicitly mentioned to them, nor were consent forms handed to them before the sessions since it was felt that these would introduce extra layers of formality and negatively affect their contributions in the discussions. However, participants were made aware beforehand that the workshop and the discussions were research-based (as part of the aims of the CINDER Centre) and, therefore, would be recorded. Since the participants did not raise any objections to this, the sessions were openly recorded.

15 Co-Creation Hub is a co-working space for new media and IT-based workers in Lagos. I refer to such spaces in my empirical chapters as one of the places where some of my respondents operated from.

During the focus group sessions my main concern was to gain more insight into new media practice in Nigeria and to understand the pertinent issues related to working in the industry. From the responses of the participants, I obtained an appreciable understanding of the challenges that individuals and companies face in the Nigerian environment.

From the focus groups, I was able to find out:

1. How new media work was understood in the Nigerian context.

2. The roles, competencies and skills expected of new media workers.

3. The employment opportunities and contract arrangements in the industry.

From the onset of the field research, one of my abiding aims was to acquire sufficient knowledge about how new media work was understood by people who worked in the industry within the Nigerian context. This was important to know because I wanted to identify the occupational activities that had emerged within it and the key concerns that people had about it. During focus group sessions, the responses made by participants appeared to be more balanced and less inhibited. The remarks and comments by individual respondents helped to stimulate others to pursue various lines of thinking. For this reason, the questions I asked did not follow a rigid pattern but were adapted to the comments and answers of the participants. For example, when a participant of one of the focus groups mentioned the difficulties he experienced when dealing with some clients, this theme was taken up by other participants who also spoke about how they suffered from general misconceptions about new media work.

Although it was not one of the questions I had previously prepared, the topic was an important one because it highlighted how the fledgling nature of the industry affected new media workers in negative ways. For this reason, the focus groups helped provide me with something akin to the collective view of people in the industry. In addition, the sessions offered me the opportunity to relate with participants through informal conversations, to build some rapport with them, generate leads and make new contacts for the subsequent phases of my fieldwork. Although, for reasons already mentioned above, I did not foresee challenges regarding access to potential new media companies

where I could carry out participant observation, being able to network with the participants of workshop did make it easier to decide on a particular location.

Finally, the focus groups prepared me for the next stage of the field research:

interviews and participant observation.

4.2.4 Field research phase