By Chidiebere Iwuoha
Owerri
The publisher of Blueprint, Alhaji Mohammed Idris, has been admitted as Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Mass Communication and Information Management of Nigeria (IMIM).
In an epoch-making event that took place at the refurbished Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education (AIFCE) last Thursday, the public relations icon was presented with a plaque by the institute in recognition of his immense contribution towards education and information management.
Our correspondent gathered that Idris, who was represented on the occasion by Head of Administration, Blueprint Newspapers, Mr Thomas Joseph, had paid his dues in the academia, public relations and publishing fields which culminated into the emergence of Blueprint in May 2011 as a weekly newspaper, and four months later a daily.
The publication is seen and read all over the country because of its incisive news coverage and can compare favourably with older newspapers on the newsstands.
The 2014 National Conference of IMIM, which was the reason for the gathering in Owerri, had as its theme “Celebrating Our Centenary: The Dawn of the New Media, Governance and the Democratic Space,”
Therein, the participants admitted that the New Media had taken centre stage in information dissemination and that citizens’ reporting was the vogue because the availability of new technologies had greatly enhanced the operations of this aspect of media, and that through it necessary awareness on any issue under the sun was being created among people.
They, however, associated it with subjectivity as propaganda occupied a greater percentage of its product which in some cases was full of distractions and promoted speculative reporting. They further said the New Media had no reputable bodies or offices to apply the principle of checks and balances on them, like was being done in professional journalism.