Newspaper vendors are some of the most visible faces in every town. But now, they must prepare to leave. Perhaps for good.
They will be leaving town soon because of innovation between Safaricom and two main dailies, Standard and Nation, to sell digital copies of their newspapers at Sh20.
A hard copy cost 60. With Safaricom deal, most newspaper buyers are likely to go for the digital bargain because they will save 200%.
The shift has been building up. Many vendors have been mourning drop in sales in the recent past because a significant number of readers access their news online, mostly through the smartphone.
While online news in Kenya is offered for free today, top newspapers have taken baby steps towards paywalls.
Vendors are the heart-beat of the newspaper market in Kenya since November 15, 1902, when the first copy of the African Standard, the mother of the current Standard, rolled off the press in Mombasa.
As a newspaper enthusiast since my early primary school days, then a reporter and later a publisher, I have had an intimate relationship with vendors.
Vendors are a priced ‘commodity’ to newspaper publishers for they can make or break your company. A poor display of your newspaper on the stands means fewer sales. They are prized business intelligence agents, among many of their unofficial roles.
Vendors have been lucky that historically, newspaper publishers in Kenya have generously invested in this channel of distribution. But for the publishers, this has been detrimental.
The idea that it is only the vendors who can sell newspapers became so engrained in Kenya that other channels like Dukas, kiosks, public service vehicles, home drops and many others were given little attention or ignored.
It meant therefore that vendors enjoyed a sort of monopoly and became conscious about it. As a result, they have used this advantage to fight any chance of diversifying newspaper sales channels.
To me, this is one of the reasons newspaper readership in Kenya has remained low, and I will tell you why.
To illustrate, I give you an example from our experience.
In January 2014, we launched a newspaper called Mt. Kenya Star, which as the name suggests, covered the counties of Mt. Kenya region.
In the two months after the launch, we noticed sales were extremely low and doubted our earlier market research. During the third month, we came up with an idea which we first tested in two places.
A county headquarters and a village town in the deeper rural area that was considered prosperous because of hosting a tea processing factory and several schools.
In the main town, we introduced home drops where our freelance vendors – people who had no prior experience of selling newspapers – dropped to homes, offices and business premises of their clients.
In the village market, our freelance vendor identified locals who were likely to buy a newspaper and developed a database. Later, he would drop the newspaper to the readers’ homes or business premises.
We incorporated selected bars and restaurants as sales points. During the local market days, our village vendor would hawk the newspapers.
What happened in the fourth month shocked all of us because the sales grew exponentially. The numbers rose by at least 900%.
Since then, we reviewed our investments in a mainstream vendor as a sales channel significantly downwards.
Because of the monopoly status, they enjoy as noted above, vendors have become almost the sole feedback channel of news readership preferences to publishers.
Often during the editorial meetings, and during sales review, vendors’ feedback carries the day as it were.
In my experience, however, the standard response from vendors is nearly uniform; that the newspaper has not sold well because it has not covered this or that politician, and in a certain way.
In brief, if the headline is not political, then the motivation to sell also becomes low. Woe unto to the small newspapers, with a non-political headline, the paper is not even displayed.
Vendors have played positive roles in the growth of newspaper readership in Kenya and the growth of the media industry in general.
But technology is knocking off their stands.