Ayodele Olalere
The Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI), has commended the management of The Nigerian Xpress newspaper for its vision and commitment to disseminating quality and genuine information to the public.
The non-denominational group said the birth of the newspaper has ushered a new dawn in the Nigeria media industry and charged the management to be focused in achieving its vision and objectives.
During a visit to the company’s head office, the national director, South West 3, of the group, Ifeanyi Atueyi, said the vision of the management of the newspaper, was in tandem with that of the founder of the fellowship, Demos Shakarian, 67years ago, who founded the group with the aim of reaching out to ordinary people with the good news.
Atueyi added the fellowship started with a vision which the founder pursued and urged the management to be focused in their determination to become number one newspaper in Nigeria.
“A leader must have a vision. Without vision, you don’t know where you are going. In our fellowship, our vision is about people, men and women. We call ourselves ordinary business people because we are not pastors; we are people in the market place, factories, publishing houses and offices. The vision is about ordinary people.
“This vision was given by God to a gentleman in 1952 in Los Angeles. His name is Demos Shakarian. God gave him the vision that he will use his wealth to heal the nation and to reach out to ordinary men. He started with men but later accommodated women. He noticed that the men should not derail so he tried to bring them to God.
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“He started organizing breakfast meetings in hotels and people gathered to share testimony. It was not church but fellowship full of ordinary men and traders. What they did was to share testimony on what God has done in their lives,” he said.
He added: “We present Christ to people. We are evangelists in the market places. That vision is still running and because the members are ordinary people, it is non-denominational. The vision has spread to several nations. In Nigeria it is very strong because we have more than 3, 500 chapters. In Lagos we are about 500 chapters.”
The group called for partnership between it and the paper especially for its forthcoming annual business seminar in June.
While congratulating the group for being the first to visit the corporate head office of the newspaper, the Managing Director, Nigerian Xpress newspaper, Mr Steve Nwosu, said the company has experienced staff that had spent several years in the media industry and are ready to use their experience in moving the company forward.
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He added the paper would ‘bridge the gap between the hard and soft copies’ and publish news the public really want to read. He further said the newspaper, though publishing weekly, would soon go daily to the benefit of the public.
“We are group of experienced journalists from different media houses. We want to do a paper that will publish what readers want to read. We discovered many newspapers used to publish what they think people should read but we want to give more of what people say they want to read. We want to use it as bridge between the hardcopy newspaper and the soft copies. Even though our hardcopy is coming out weekly, our online comes out every day because that is where new readers are going,” he said.
He added: “We also know the online have been populated by fake news so we want to give genuine professional journalism. We don’t just throw anything into our platform. We want to play strong on human interest, politics, business and big interviews. We are happy you are the first visitors to come here.”
