Science and tech journalism isn't lucrative in Nigeria! I’d like to begin my blog on this subject because it's what we've been made to believe.

It doesn't make the front pages like politics. It doesn't trend hourly like entertainment or create buzz like crime. It's too abstract, too complex for the average reader to understand, so most journalists, we were told, avoid it. Not because it isn't important, but because that importance isn't enough to put food on the table.

Yet outside our newsrooms, I found a different story. You see, on the global scale, there is Ed Young, a writer in the US. Before him, people thought of biology simply as a school subject, but he wrote about animals and about pandemics in a way that captivated hearts, and so, he won a Pulitzer Prize. The biggest award in journalism. He transformed science writing to philosophy. One that asks, how do we live? How do we survive?

Or we could also look at John Carrion. He used his skills to investigate a tech company called Terranos. And it remains one of the most consequential journalism projects of the 21st century. It was science reporting, it was tech reporting, and it exposed corporate fraud, saved investors billions of dollars, and protected patients from harm. Without exaggerating, this investigation didn't just win awards, it changed people’s lives.

These journalists did not succeed despite choosing science and tech, they succeeded because they chose science and tech.

Now back home, Nigerian health and climate reporters have also won international recognition. For preventing epidemics through their reports, for environmental investigations, and for science storytelling. Nigerian journalists today have received various journalism awards, global fellowships, and have travelled around the world, not by abandoning this beat, but by mastering it. So why do we look down on science and tech reporting?

I mean, every morning Nigerians wake up and check their phones before anything else. We debate data prices, we replace cash with mobile transfers, a fintech story. When floods displace entire communities, that is a climate science story. When a disease outbreak exposes a weak health system, that is science reporting at its most urgent.

So, science and tech journalism hasn't become necessary because journalists have somehow fallen in love with laboratories or code. It has become necessary because science and technology moved into our everyday life. We've just failed to educate the common man on why they should care. We didn't learn early enough how powerful it can be when it is done well.

Today, we have an AI Unipod located close to the Faculty of Social Science, Unilag. But not many people know about this because we haven't been inclined to let them know, to bring the news to them that we’ve made history. That the University of Lagos, Nigeria is the first university in Nigeria to welcome AI. This is central news that should’ve been publicized and spread by our science and tech reporters, but we keep sleeping on this beat.

AI, for instance, is something that is rapidly affecting our world today.
 

So, to be a reporter in this field means you're writing about how we live right now. Because the dry land they told us about is actually where the money is.

@nifesisuraj