Royal Media has been nudged into action by the recent entry of South Africa’s News24 into the Kenyan media market. Citizen news has had very uncoordinated way of delivering news online but that looks to change as the group is set to launch www.citizennews.co.ke which will have both text and multimedia news.
The portal developed by Verviant runs on Joomla and is set to give Royal Media a platform to fight competition on online news. It is only Nation Media and Capital Fm which has at-least some strong footing on online news. Royal Media snatched Julie Gichuru from Nation Media to strengthen their footing on digital front but most of these old-age journalists and media managers believe limit their idea of digital news to premium SMS, a sketchy website and some Facebook present.
None of the companies have strongly thought of superior apps for tablets and mobile with the current apps being just bookmarks of the websites. We hope that they will change in time. The great dinosaur of news delivery in Kenya is the Standard Group whose website looks like a museum of news.
I really doubt if Royal Media’s new news portal was the best they could do but I still know how the mainstream media lacks out-of-the-box thought. I can point out 50 better templates for both Joomla and WordPress which could beat the new portal Royal media is to launch.
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