News agencies
No one knows Nigeria like NAN. Very true, actually — no one covers Nigeria like the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). With 501 editorial staff nationwide, no newspaper boasts of NAN’s profound reach and mobility across the 36 states of the country. The agency produces more than 200 stories per day and is therefore subscribed to by all the major Nigerian newspapers.
The only problem is that NAN is no better than a print government mouthpiece, rarely reporting news critical of the government of the day and always leaving its independent subscribers rewriting their headlines after sieving through NAN content.
NAN is also in a perpetual cold battle against newspapers and blogs plagiarizing its content. For many years, the agency hasn’t found a solution to the problem of access to its subscribed content by non-subscribers, and the appropriation of NAN stories and pictures by non-subscribers without giving due credit.
Although NAN has a correspondent in New York, it often works in collaboration with Reuters and Xinhua news agencies — the other two popular news agencies in Nigeria.