How Nigerian bloggers got it all wrong-Kemi Olunloyo

Date: 03-05-2013 4:52 pm (10 years ago) | Author: Direct
- at 3-05-2013 04:52 PM (10 years ago)
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BEING an international journalist and veteran professional blogger has exposed me to so many ways how stories are written in today’s media. With the advent of social media, the Nigerian public has new venues of getting news, but are they all true? Blogging known as “Web logging” started in the 90’s when I joined Pyra in 1999 and started logging a news diary of what I find useful on the web under my domain Keminications.com. The word quickly got shortened from web logging to “blogging” and it was a format of writing short posts or stories that was fed on top of each other on your page.
Later Google bought Pyra and in 2004, I created Keminications Media in Atlanta, GA USA and converted my blog from a media news and gossip blog to a music and media news blog thus HipHossip.com was born in 2004. At the same time, some of my great blogging colleagues now celebrities in the blogosphere started their respective blogs. They are Necolebitchie.com, TheYBF.com, SandraRose.com, PerezHilton.com, FreddyO.com, StraightfromtheA.com, Blackandmarriedwithkids.com.
Necole, Michelle, Sandra, Perez, Natasha, Freddy, Lamar and Ronnie are all doing their thing from blogging about entertainment to black families and Hollywood. I blog only music and media gossip. Our Nigerian bloggers are starting on a very bad foot. Many are not writing stories. They are sourcing stories from others while sometimes feeding the bad non-credible sources into their blogs. I am a newsmaker in many Nigerian blogs.
A good example of that is when I posted a picture of me holding one of the machine guns I helped seize from drug dealers in Toronto. This picture was taken at the Toronto Police Chief’s dinner. Earlier that week I warned Nigerian blogger Linda Ikeji on another story to always clarify her headlines and stop using them to attract hits. It is important to have a credible story. Over 50 blogs ran stories headlined “Kemi Olunloyo’s Warning to Bloggers, shows us her Guns” and subtitled “Two shots and I’ll send you up to Abacha, TuPac and Michael Jackson”—which is my untouchable line.
The false information in that story was the guns. That was not my gun, the picture showed me holding an M16 rifle with the Police Chief right behind me. The Nigerian public is duped into thinking that gun is in my possession. These are the kinds of mistakes everyone does when they feed off a bigger blog. You have to go to the source, which is what Nigerian bloggers Stella Dimoko-Korkus, Oliver at Doris Dosage, Victoria Roberts and Laila do.
They actually come to me to ask questions and I have chosen to do interviews with them recently.
Most Nigerian bloggers are not credible! One female blogger stole rights-managed pictures off my sites and failed to credit them even after reaching out to her to give credit where credit is due. I go out and take pictures at events and to see someone using it and even adding their negative opinion to it is disgusting. She even told her readers that I went to pose with stars at Bisi Komolafe’s funeral. She has refused to credit my images, which is now on the desk at Google copyright as I have filed a claim. I can also file a lawsuit for damages.
Nigerian bloggers need to know how copyright claims work in the blogosphere. There is a lot of stealing images, lifting stories (plagiarism) and inserting sour opinions into their stories.
When you write stories you heard and add your own negative two cents, you are risking a possible interview with that celebrity or another in the future.

Posted: at 3-05-2013 04:52 PM (10 years ago) | Hero