So, what’s new in the refreshed Nation rolled out last Saturday, August 1? Just asking.
Nobody was alive to remember the “Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.” So, everyone please sit down for a minute and listen to the story.
Once upon a time, urban transport was by horse-drawn carriages. Now horses are animals. They must defecate.
One Ben Johnson writes in the Historic UK blog that by the late 1800s, large cities in the West were drowning in horse manure. At some point, London had 50,000 horses pulling hansom cabs and commuter buses daily. The horses dumped up to 1.7 million pounds of manure a day on the London streets. New York had 100,000 horses, dumping 2.5 million pounds of manure a day.
The horses also peed, two pints of urine per day. Their average lifespan was three years. So, the stench from Dandora garbage site pales in comparison to the stench from the mix of horse carcasses, pee and manure on the London and New York streets at that time.
A wakeup call came in an 1894 story by The Times newspaper, which predicted that if things continued on this path, “in 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
A fresh innovation to solve the horse manure crisis eluded the world until 1908, when American industrialist Henry Ford invented the automobile. And just like that, experts in manure recycling were rendered jobless.
Think of how great innovations happen. The electric bulb was not invented by continuous improvement of the candle or nyangile — Luo word for the once ubiquitous paraffin-fueled, smoky wick lamp. No, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb in the late 19th century was a true invention.
The newspaper business is crying for true invention. The trajectory of hard print copy readership is plummeting. And it will not go up. Day by day, the only reliable consumer of the newspaper left standing is the butcher. The butcher needs a meat wrapper.
Yet, the new-look Nation that hit the streets on August 1 did nothing to respond to readers who don’t need a newspaper. Content delivery? Nothing new. An innovative product in the much-touted digital convergence and syndication pursuit? Nah. Instead, Kimathi Street simply did a new front, found new font styles and a fresh-smelling masthead for the country’s foremost newspaper.
To be fair, the Nation is not alone in this struggle to innovate. Since the early 2000s, when the Internet became mainstream and mobile devices landed in our palms, the whole newspaper world has been stuck in this crisis, with varying degrees of incremental progress.
Here at home, innovation is still a strange word. Every few years, our newspapers rebrand. They throw a loud party at the Carnivore grounds and holler about a relaunched, fresh newspaper. Under the hood? Unnoticeable innovation, zero invention.
The world needs a light bulb. Not a continuous improvement of the candle. Readers need an automobile. Not another manure conference. If we continue recycling the newspaper without real innovation, something may come and replace the newspaper. And the whole lot of us will be jobless.
So, there’s invention. And there’s ukarabati, panel-beating. The Nation did the latter.
*********
On the other hand, we’re in the middle of a stubborn, deadly pandemic. Was a refreshed newspaper the top priority of decision makers at Kimathi Street? Just asking.
