Presented on Friday August 10, 2007 at a workshop on the Nollywood Film Industry and the African Diaspora in the UK, organized collaboratively by the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies; Open University; the Department of Creative Arts, University of Lagos, and the British Film Institute.

Abstract
To inquire into the representation of the Nigerian video-film and DVD industry in the Nigerian news media is to bring about the inter-relatedness between two major mass-audience artistic and economic enterprises. With more than two thousand released directly for home-viewing in 2006 alone, video-films have established themselves as one of the most dominant form of popular culture in Nigeria, perhaps sharing enormous media visibility on the same scale with the new wave of popular Nigerian hip-hop and rap music.
With the dawning of the 1990s, the discourse on arts and entertainment in Nigerian media assumed a somewhat high profile. This was mostly felt in the emerging video-film industry that was beginning to record increasing activities in production and alternative mode of distribution. As star actors emerged and many known professionals from allied television and stage-theatre sub-sectors became attracted to the 'new' industry, the media became the arena of re-production and transformation for the emerging industry.
Over time, with production activities becoming profuse but nevertheless sustainable, more pages dedicated to the film and video beat appeared in most newspapers and magazines; and more hours of coverage with a whole new body of programming created on television and radio stations across the country to report the video-film industry. The emergence of a new crop of film critics that are staff journalists also developed as a feature of the new industry, raising the artistic and social construct of the new Nigerian cinema.
This paper examines to what degree print and broadcast media have played a role in the emergence of Nollywood as a dominant mass product. As will be seen, the social and economic functions of the video-film and DVD industry have always been the primary crucible of representation in the Nigerian media, perhaps because they are so dependent on advertising and circulation revenues. The paper will also touch on the emergence and decline of a number of 'industry publications' that have attempted to focus on the video-film industry but have nearly all failed to make economic impacts. The paper will conclude with the hypothesis that Nollywood owes its popularity in the Nigerian media due, in part, to the deregulation of the broadcast media in 1992 and to the exploitation of the desire by majority of local audiences to see their own stories told by movie professionals known to them.


Introduction

The print and electronic media in Nigeria predate the advent of film and indigenous Nigerian cinema. Through the first news publication in Nigeria - Iwe Irohin fun awon Egba (Newspaper for the Egbas) first published in 1859; the Lagos Daily News in 1923, the West African Pilot in 1937, as well as Africa's first television network, the Nigerian Television Authority, which was established in 1959 through the chain then known as the Western Nigerian Television (WNTV), professional Nigerian journalists and broadcasters have always functioned as commentators on the arts and culture many years before the release of Kongi's Harvest in 1971, which is credited as the first independently-produced Nigerian feature film. Expectedly, the Nigerian media had reported the arrival of cinema art in the country in 1903 at the Glover memorial Hall in Lagos, and the subsequent production activities on film through the former colonial film unit and government-sponsored productions. Since then, the influence of the Nigerian media on the motion picture industry has always been inevitable; often becoming a subject of critical and socio-cultural discourse. This paper explores in particular the boom in both the Nigerian video-film industry beginning from the early 1990s as a non-marginalised, media attraction that owes its popularity, in part, to the deregulation of the broadcast media in 1992 and to the boom in tabloid publications. It shall also outline the impact of cross-fertilisation of a number of professionals functioning between the media and film sectors, with a view to drawing a parallel between the low sale output of Nigerian films on DVD and the relatively low circulation figures of Nigerian dailies, in spite of the huge Nigerian population.

Nollywood, the media and recognition

The Nigeria cinema is an apt example of an industry that is reinventing itself. How an industry that produced less than 50 films on celluloid in the 1970s and 80s would have nurtured a deserving media attention in comparison to the frenetic pace in which close to 15,000 (fifteen thousand) video-films, using new digital technologies of production and distributed on DVDs since the 1990s should be a focus of media and academic study. Fore this reason, this paper shall begin with recognition for an article on the new Nigerian cinema that won a special mention at the last edition of the CNN African Journalist of the Year Award that held in July, 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa. Titled The Revolution Called Nollywood, and authored by Justus Nwakanma, a journalist with Daily Champion, the feature article on the boom in the contemporary Nigerian Film and Video industry as representative of a growing media focus on the Nigerian motion picture industry. Like Nollywood itself, the article also represents how the media's coverage of Nollywood is earning international respect.

"It started more or less like an experiment, an attempt at the unusual […] the Nigerian home-video industry has recorded resounding success in what has been widely regarded as a cultural revoluation."

(Nwakanma, 2006, in the introduction to his article for The Champion which won a special mention at the 2007 edition of the CNN African Journalist of the year award in South Africa).

However, it is pertinent to ask to what extent precisely are Nigerian video-films treated as worthy news materials in the Nigerian print and electronic media in the past decade.
To understand how the Nigerian media function in relation to the coverage of video-film industry, it is pertinent to understand how the print media has transformed into a wholly independent enterprise, with a fertile ground for the kind of relationship that the print media currently nurtures with Nollywood. Except for Daily Times and New Nigerian newspapers, which used to be the leading government-owned national dailies, virtually all the major newspapers, magazines and tabloids/general interest magazines in Nigeria are privately owned. Daily Times, which used to be the flagship of newspaper journalism in Nigeria and from where many critics and arts journalists of the pre-Nollywood era (i.e, the period before the 1990s) that covered the film industry have been privatized, while New Nigerian, which provided a good coverage of the northern region of Nigeria has stopped publishing for a few years, having been listed for privatization.
The situation of Nollywood-focused media today is, therefore, effectively a privately-owned enterprise through publications such as Punch, The Guardian, This Day, The News, Tell, National Encomium and Big Screen. It used to be said in most newsrooms that the arts, and by extension the film and cinema pages are 'back of the book' feature. That argument probably explains why until the 1990s there were hardly any pages dedicated to the cinema and movie review, partly, as media owners would say, due to insufficiency of productions to sustain regular reports. Or, as some editors would argue, due to small numbers of critics and journalists with sufficient training in the art of cinema, outside of contributors from the academia that could provide informed view on cinema reportage, reports on cinema and films were subsumed within the arts and entertainment pages. However, both arguments seem to have been effectively challenged by the unprecedented level of activities in the new cinema movement that is otherwise addressed as Nollywood. The press now provides regular information that audiences use to form their perception of the new movement in the production and distribution of a new popular cinema and how social realities, values and identities are conveyed.

Conceptualising news formation in the press
In my introduction, I gave an indication of how the coverage of the new Nigerian cinema is perhaps on the same scale as the coverage of the contemporary hip-hop and rap music in Nigeria. Part of the aim of this paper is to show how this demonstrates that the press plays a major role not only in directing audiences on news signification but also, and more importantly in this context, to note how the media has responded remarkably well to the developments that have fostered new cultural phenomenon in both the popular music and movie industries. In this sense, it can be argued that Nollywood, as a product of digital and alternative cinema that is succeeding in locating its voice within its own environment, is the cinematic equivalent of the new wave hip-hop music in Nigeria that has successfully jettisoned the emulation of American type of hip-hop and rap music as well as Jamaica's dance-hall raga chants for a uniquely Nigerian flavour of popular music.
It is, indeed, possible that the hype and phenomenal media coverage for Nollywood in the same manner as the new wave popular music is representative of the direct consequence of the creation of a whole new movement in the mould of cultural renaissance. It is a media-friendly industry where the star-system is modeled after that of Hollywood and Bollywood, and where scandals and denials, social functions and ceremonies as well as artistic accomplishments do not only demand the presence of TV cameras and paparazzi but also accord them symbolic narrative function. When, for example, the press recognizes Idumota in Lagos and Iweka Road in Onitsha as being symptomatic of a new business paradigm in the distribution of cinematic content; the same way that Surulere area of Lagos has become the movie equivalent of what Ajegunle is to music, in the discovery of young talents, the media seems to be expressing a strong urge to situate creativity within a certain locale, and therefore worthy of constant media attention. In other words, the film and video press, as an integral part of the arts and entertainment beat, like the professionals they cover are emerging from a marginalized position of low recognition and spaces for expression and are now locked in a symbiotic relationship that is kept alive by the high level of production activity and huge audience support.
However, to give appropriate contexts of the representation of the new Nigerian cinema in the Nigerian press and how news coverage tends to have an impact on the industry, it is necessary to highlight the area of coverage into the types and periodicity of the news publications:

Theorizing Nollywood in the dailies
The style and patterns of new coverage of the Nigerian video-film and DVD industry varies considerable from one newspaper to the other. Until October 1995 when The Guardian commenced daily arts pages, which was unprecedented, reports on the arts and by extension cinema were limited to weekends and mid-week review pages. However, daily coverage of the arts is traceable to the practice of dedicating Thursdays to reports and reviews on the video-film industry in The Guardian. Production, then at less than three hundred in a year provided enough materials for media interest. Yet, the development of new networks of distribution, sales and exhibition that never existed before the video boom provided motivation for a newspaper like The Guardian that has always appealed to the upper-middle and the intellectual class and to This Day, which gained instant acceptance in 1995 when it joined the newsstands at a period when three of the leading dailies, including The Guardian and The Punch had been proscribed for one year by the military regime of general Abacha. The daily arts pages, which had become popular since then in the Nigerian press, owe their inspiration to the newspaper. Both This Day and The Comet also had daily arts pages with at least a day dedicated to movies and reviews.
The Punch, with its long history of Saturday entertainment pages in the last few years has developed a taste for reporting and reviewing Nollywood films through its Arts and Life pages on Fridays and Culture pages on Sundays. Ostensibly, its aim is to treat the video-film industry as a news-generating beat like any other, which therefore should compete for front-page lead articles with politics, business and sports. Also, the paper's coverage of local, regional and international film festivals is far more elaborate and regular than any other publication in Nigeria.
The Sun probably has more pages of combined coverage for Nollywood through its mid-week, Friday and weekend editions. As a paper that got introduced to readers as the 'king of the tabloids' its interest in the movie industry is probably informed more by general-interest, soft-touch coverage. And at its inception in 2002, it exhibited the urge to court Nollywood stars not just as news sources, but also as columnists and contributors: Star actors such as Richard Mofe-Damijo, Genevieve Nnaji and Omotola Jalade-Ekehinde, had weekly columns in the first few months of the paper to express their views about their industry. A pioneer and veteran of the film industry, Chief Eddy Ugbomah, still writes a weekly column about issues inn Nollywood for the paper on Fridays.
Editorially, a dominant factor influencing content and page identification in many of the newspapers is the evolution of the industry itself. The Nation, a national daily and PM News, a regional, evening paper, both have weekly columns called Inside Nollywood. Content is informed more by star and personality interviews than issues or reviews. These are pages that don't turn their backs on the private lives of Nollywood stars. While many of the Nollywood news pages are robust across editorial and pictorial specifications, ethical concerns often remain. The Nation's Inside Nollywood publishes the e-mail addresses and mobile telephone numbers of actors, while PM News did not hesitate to publish the nude pictures of an actress and Reality Television star, which got leaked to the press from a faulty lap top computer she had given out for repairs. Daily Independent's Life section and weekend celebrity-entertainment pull-out pages celebrate an image of the industry, which is not at all new but representative of the media's fascination with a new and growing industry. Similarly, Vanguard gives two pages of Home Video People every Saturday, while This Day's special publication on Sunday, Glitterati, has Movies and Review pages with a distinct return to the model of admixture of the critical with the reportorial. In the Saturday edition, another Nollywood star and comedian, Basorge Tariah Jnr., writes in a column called Man About Town, in Pidgin English, apparently inspired by the Lagos Weekend of the 1980s where popular columns were written in Pidgin English for mass readership. Nollywood in Saturday papers are popular in Air Time (written by popular freelancer, Onoshe Nwabuikwu) which moved from Punch to This Day in 2003, The Guardian's Nollywood Celebrity Focus (written by another freelance critic, Shuaibu Husseini) and The Tribune's Roll Tape.
However, like Nollywood itself, the press nurtures a recognizable ethnic diversity. This is achieved precisely through newspapers published in the three main regions of the country - North, West and the East - with attention on the video-film activities in their respective region. In this sense, Daily Trust, which has emerged as a strong pro-Northern Nigeria national daily, has copious spaces for Hausa-language video-films and filmmakers than any other paper. It's weekend magazine section on Saturdays has a column dedicated to 'Kannywood' the sobriquet for the Hausa video-film sub-sector largely located in Kano, northern Nigeria's biggest city. Similarly, The Tribune and Daily Champion are seen to treat news pages on Nollywood as representational spaces for Yoruba video-films and Igbo-English language video-films respectively.


Contextualizing the magazines
Nigeria's vibrant press allows for a rich array of periodicals, monthlies, news weeklies and tabloid weeklies to flourish. Since the 1990s, there has been a noticeable increase and improvement in the coverage of the industry. For one thing, monthly magazines such as Genevieve and True Love in a style similar to global practice, gives cover spaces to actors and Nollywood industry professionals with feature article-worthy treatments, in successive editions. The same style is discernible in publications such as The Events Magazine and to some extent Ovation International. In speaking of the social coverage of Nollywood, news weeklies such as Tell, Newswatch, The News, The Source, National Standard and Insider Weekly have refrained from gratuitous portrayal of the industry. In the mid and late 1990s when top weeklies concentrated on anti-military news, Nollywood stories softened the paper. And in the current era of discoveries of astounding degrees of misappropriation of public funds by some corrupt politicians, some would argue, stories about Nollywood and its celebrities now provide a good distraction. It probably would not matter if the long articles are as probing as the conviction of a couple actors caught while trying to smuggle hard drugs out of Nigeria, or as exhilarating as the yearly gathering of Nollywood stars and filmmakers in the Niger Delta city of Yenagoa, (Bayelsa State) for the annual African MovieAcademy Awards (AMAA), the news-feature format in the weeklies is inherently attached to the core essence of Nollywood.


The dominant style for romance magazines, exemplified by Hints and Hearts, is to sell fictional stories about relationships to largely female readers. However, since the Nollywood boom in the early 1990s, star actresses have replaced its cartoon illustrations and professional models on cover pages. And given the huge market this genre of publications enjoys, an entertainment pull-out pages dominated by Nollywood stories has become its latest feature and selling-point. However, by far the largest promoters of Nollywood, perhaps, are the tabloids, generally regarded in Nigeria as soft-sell or general interest journalism. By positioning themselves as alternative to the mainstream press, Fame, Ace, National Encomium, Global Excellence, City People, First Weekly and News of the people have established themselves as alternative public spheres with limitless pages for the video-film industry. They personalize, fictionalize, simplify and thrive on sensation and scandal. For Nollywood, they do not only report the news but also create it through their own industry parties, couples' night and myriad of programmes regularly organized to court Nollywood celebrities and generate news and vivid pictorial materials. The two longest awards ceremony for the industry were instituted by Fame (The Movie Awards - THEMA) and National Encomium (The Reel Awards) respectively. As Nollywood's boom peaked, the tablodisation of the industry became entrenched on spectators' consciousness through gossip columns like Nollywood Gists (City People) and Nollywood Extra (National Encomium).

Industry publications and sustainability question
An integral aspect of the media coverage of the new Nigerian cinema, as I mentioned in my introduction, is the emergence and decline of publications that have attempted to report the video-film exclusively. By far the most significant has been the London-based Nigerian Videos (publisher: Mike Abiola). It emerged in the mid-1990s as a monthly wholly dedicated to creating social and artistic discourses around the new industry. It was helped along by the 'industry reputation' of its publisher as a producer, promoter and the organizer of one of the longest running award ceremonies celebrating achievements in the Nigerian video-film industry - the Afro-hollywood awards which holds every October in London. It was an apt example of how a publication could bridge the seeming divide between homeland Nigeria and the Nigerian diasporic community in the United Kingdom. And by using a wider 'catchment area' model, Nigerian Videos as an industry publication, at least in theory, became a necessary feature of the new industry, where articles did not have to struggle for space.
A more recent example of homeland - diasporic industry publication is M&M: Music and Movies (publisher: Dayo Olomu) with a dual entertainment discourse. But like Nigerian Videos, it became unsustainable, perhaps due to the financial implications of publishing in London and distributing in Nigeria or the inability of the target industry to sustain sales and advertisement; or both.
However, Nigeria-based industry publications have faced similar challenges. Government-owned publications like Film and Video; (published by the Nigerian Film Corporation) to extol the virtues of Nigerian films and highlight the corporation's activities in the promotion of the industry has been rested for a while. Other industry titles have always been the brainchild of industry practitioners rather than professional journalists. Jide Kosoko (actor, director) is a two-time industry publisher. He published the Theatre Mirror, which ran between 1994 and 1995 sparingly to capture the Yoruba sub-sector's multi-disciplinary engagements in the celluloid film, theatre and home-video productions and later in 2005 Movie Watch for a few months. Madu Chikwendu's (Director, producer) Movie Africa, which is still on the newsstands, is hard to classify. It is published whenever the means is available. Big Screen (publisher: Biodun Caston-Dada) falls within the same category - publishable when able. However, in spite of the various degrees of contents and intent to cater to the needs of the industry, Nollywood yet awaits an authentic industry publication that will not be plagued by structural weakness and small market.
Nevertheless, a daily newspaper, New Age, has also provided another example of the short life-span of specialized or industry publications exclusively covering Nollywood. Between 2003 and early 2006, the paper published a monthly tabloid called Nollywood and wholly dedicated to the celebration of the industry. Nollywood magazine was not only significant for being the first national newspaper to have a publication wholly dedicated to the film industry, but because it was edited by Muritala Sule, a professional with training and interest in both the media (print and broadcast) and film (scripting and producing). But like others before it, Nollywood was rested because it failed to gain the needed access to sufficient advertising revenue; more so that it could not survive solely on circulation. Nollywood's successive industry publication, even with the advantage of low competition, is yet to enjoy the kind of patronage that specialized publications in the business and sports sectors have.

Debating the economics of sales
In this regard, the decline in industry publications for the movie sector in Nigeria can be argued to be symptomatic of the low circulation figures affecting national newspapers in Nigeria in the same way as the low sales figures of an average Nollywood video-film. Without any official or verifiable data in the industry, a hit video-film, according to film marketers and producers, is expected to sell above 200,000 units on DVD. Only a few, if any at all, is believed to have hit that mark in the past few years, with average sales said to be between 15,000 and 45,000 copies. For the newspapers, according to the statistics from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, The Punch, which is the largest-circulation newspaper, sells 95,000 on weekdays and about 110,000 on weekends. Only advertisement revenues tend to make up for low circulation figures for many of the newspapers and magazines. While it can be argued that fierce competition tends to reduce sales for both newspapers and video-films on DVD, specific reason for low sales for the two enterprises might be largely attributed to poor distribution channels that prevent a good newspaper like a hit film from fulfilling its market potential. Furthermore, it may be added that a segmented video-movie market that divides production and distribution along ethnic and geographical zones cannot claim to be truly national in outlook.


Framing Nollywood on the small screen
The representation of the Nigerian video-film industry on Nigerian television is a segmented in-road into two broad areas - on the one hand, the daily screenings of the video-films as a replacement for Hollywood films that used to fill the late night movie slots; and on the other, the quantity of the programming dedicated exclusively to industry news and personalities. Both have fully simulated into the society's consciousness, and as such, this argument responds to this paper's aim to examine not just the press coverage of Nollywood, but the broadcast, particularly the television stations' opinion of the industry. While the federal government-owned Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and states government-owned television stations have provided minimal coverage to the film industry before the 1990s, and still does, the television coverage of Nollywood has recorded an unprecedented boom since 1992 as a result of the deregulation of the broadcast industry by the federal military government.
With deregulation came more stations, 24-hour broadcast and demand for more programming. And with the television content regulator, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) insisting on a 60% local content programming, Nollywood films became a ready source-pool of materials for the stations. Save for a few that still broadcast Hollywood films, both the government-owned and independent television stations, as I mentioned earlier, now fill their late night movie slots with Nollywood films. Since 2002 when the industry hit the one thousand production mark, many of the stations now have matinee and midnight broadcast of Nollywood films. Furthermore, with most of the movies in part-1 & 2, and sometimes with part 3, the industry has not been found low in content. Nollywood movies and their advertisements on Nigerian TV stations have therefore moved on from just prime time to every time.
However, it can be argued that the boom in the video-films and TV stations' interest in them is as a result of the failure of normal television drama programmes owing to the abandonment of the format for the new video-film industry by many producers. The reason would seem to be the perceived preference by advertisers to sponsor the acquisition and broadcast of Mexican melodramas rather than fund the production of new local soap operas. Nevertheless, audiences are not known to be overly critical of Nollywood films having accepted them as home-entertainment videos. Another reason why audiences seem at ease with several daily broadcasts of Nollywood movies on television is because there is only a thin line separating video-film actors from television actors. Many of the same faces that are popular on DVDs are also featuring regularly on soap operas and popular television serials. Actors in Nollywood don't just graduate from television to film. They often criss-cross the two mediums. A good example of television appropriating top video-film actors is Super Story (Producer: Wale Adenuga).
Nevertheless, the biggest demonstration of partnership and support from the media, at least in theory, came in March from NTA with the promise by the programmes department to invest N250million (about One million pounds) into the "production of quality Nollywood films" (according to NTA's Director of Marketing, Peter Igho). Twenty movies are supposed to be commissioned yearly from this project.

Telling their own stories
One of the areas of critics' engagement with Nollywood, especially at its infancy was multiple role engagement by which the script writer is the director, producer, editor and possibly the lead actor in the movie. With the media lately highlighting the discord between producers and marketers, a typical Nollywood director would probably attempt to also distribute his own movie by him or jerself. But when this is not the case, a number of professionals in the industry are often seen functioning in dual or multiple roles, usually as professionals behind the camera and at the same time as analysts and journalists promoting works by others. By so doing, they increase the visibility of the industry on television and help confirm claims that the industry, indeed, is believed to be creating jobs and encouraging diversity of services. Many of the programmes fall within the broad magazine or lifestyle/interview formats to demonstrate that the programming is only secondary to the primary focus of media visibility. And like some newspaper columns, movie-oriented programmes are as intrigued by Nollywood as an industrious provider of quick drama content as they are with its actors as fashion icons. This is particularly noticeable on NTA, AIT, MBI, Channels, Galaxy, MITV and STV to mention but a few of the independent station. A number of the key programmes articulating the emergence of the new Nigerian cinema are highlighted below:

1) Lagbo-Video: Presented by Sule (Muritala) and produced by Mahmood Alli-Balogun (Director, producer), this programme in 1994 provided one of the earliest discourses on film on NTA Channel 7, Lagos. Using the magazine/interview format, it focused substantially on the filmmakers and actors from the Yoruba sub-sector of the industry. It adopted the kind of urban-Lagos colloquial language in many of the movies - a mixture of urban Yoruba, some pidgin and occasional English for those that can be described as Yoruba-born, educated but in-between indigenous and urban-contemporary culture.
2) Video View: Presented by Theo Akatugba (Director, producer), this programme came as the English version of Lagbo-Video and concentrated on the English and Igbo language movies. Because the presenter was a 'professional' he assumed the role of a critic whose opinion sometimes got in the way. The term 'Encyclopedia of home video' which was used to be described the presenter became one of the signature tunes of the programme. As it was during Lagbo-Video, the term Nollywood was not yet in use. The programme addressed the industry as the Home-Video industry.
3) Nollywood: Produced by Tajudeen Adepetu, this was the first major programme to cash in on the popularity of the new appellation of the industry. It promoted no particular presenter but the movie stars. And it preferred the film locations to its studios. A few critics have observed that with keen interest in using film techniques in constructing Nollywood as a busy, experimental producer of drama content, each successive edition of the weekly programme is better produced even than many of the movies it is reporting. The programme is still running as a syndicated programme on a number of stations.
4) Movie Half Hour: Presented by Wale Obadeyi on NTA (Producer, Comedian) after Videoview was rested. Concise and impressionistic, the critiquing section by Chris Omozokpia (who, as a freelance journalist, had critiqued movies for The Guardian) was a high point of the programme.
5) Gate Keepers: Presented on MBI Television by Chidiebere Ugboaja (Producer, Director). It is acknowledged like Movie Half-Hour as a programme that got acknowledgements for bringing critical commentaries and analysis to the discourse of film on television. However, it was challenged for using harsh marking scheme in judging the movies and was almost attempting to re-censor and reclassify the movies. Consequently, commercial slots by video and DVD marketers slumped and the programme was temporarily rested before returning with news segments such as 'Musical Video of the Week', Quiz segment and commercial slots from government agencies.
6) Legends of Nollywood: Presented by Paul Obazele (Actor, producer), this is one of the newest programmes celebrating Nollywood on television through one of the famous actors in the industry. Without any pretence towards original format or spectacular artistic content, it welcomes anybody connected with Nollywood and willing to extol its virtues.
7) AM Movies: Presented by Rose Peter (producer/journalist) as a breakfast show within the popular AM Express magazine show on NTA. Ostensibly influenced by BBC's Talking Movies, it picked up from where Movies Music and More (Presenter: Mariam Anazodo) stopped. It reports, reviews and responds to enquiries. It is also global in outlook, following Nigeria's entries to major film festivals in Africa and Europe.

Isolating the Lagos Television model
It would seem a straightforward assumption that the Nigerian Video and DVD industry has only succeeded in securing recognition for the industry and specialization for journalists covering the beat. This explanation for recognition will, however, be incomplete without the examination of the appropriation of Sundays for the Yoruba sub-sector of the video-film industry on the Lagos Television (LTV 8). Since 1997, between 8 a.m and 5 in the evening, the station has succeeded in retaining the patronage of the video marketers and producers in the sub-sector of the industry in promoting their films every Sunday. The format adopted is uniquely entrepreneurial. Presenters are hired for their charisma and eloquence more or less as movie vendors. It is a whole appropriation of a day to advertise movies, interview stars and promote the studio-like marketing firms behind them. Economically, this format answers the sustainability questions as they are largely funded by air-time purchase by the marketers, partnership and barter arrangement with LTV 8 and commercial slots sold to other producers. At a point, it welcomed independent producers such as Tunde Kelani and Yemi Shodimu, who respectively had Aranbada and Gbarada on the same station, but preferring to use a distinctly different format. However, without the consistent sponsorship or the financial muscle of the marketers, which would only seem to come with a consistent flow of movie production, independent producers have not succeeded in this 'Sunday market' terrain.
However, in strictly keeping with Yoruba language in presentation, the LTV 8 example reinforces the argument for cultural specificity the Yorubas, as pioneers in film and later video production in Nigeria, have always employed as a model of communication and identification. Thus, given this kind of cultural and linguistic specificity, and linked to any attempt to understand the representation of cultural identity along ethnic lines in the Nigerian cinema is the necessary ancillary of discussing how media representation of Nollywood is articulated in this paper. In this regard, both the producers of these programmes and the television station itself have emerged as promoters of a new industry with a unique, albeit challenging model.

Conclusion
This paper has shown the strength of Nollywood as a popular news material for the Nigerian media. From a marginalized position caused by low level of celluloid production, it has found its way into the mainstream of Nigerian journalistic discourse, due in part to the boom in production and alternative mode of distribution and also through the deregulation of the broadcast media which allowed for and demonstrated the active participation of television stations in the promotion of this wholly indigenous industry. Also, the paper has useful anecdotal inquiry to suggest that like the press, the Nigerian video and DVD industry has not been able to fulfill its full potential due to defective distribution network.

By Steve Ayorinde

Ayorinde is a film critic and Arts Editor of Nigeria's largest-circulating newspaper, The Punch. He is a member of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) and has served on its Jury at film festivals such as Cannes, Toronto, Mumbai, Stockholm and Cairo International Film Festival. His Master's thesis at the University of Leicester, UK, focused on the Impact of Digital Technology on the Nigerian Cinema. His research interests include diasporic constructions in Nigerian video-films and media influences on African cinema.