Udo Philip Ibuot’s scientific contributions

News production goes beyond the routine of accessing, selecting, processing and interpreting events considered as newsworthy. It involves consequences of journalistic practices that are capable of influencing the professional culture, knowledge and expectations of the given medium. Though news production processes may be influenced by the editorial policy of a newspaper organisation, they should be managed away from slanting which involves omission, differential placement or even burying of anti-policy stories in inside pages. The study is an exploratory attempt that is designed on the methodology of participant observation or ethnography, and constitutes part of the first author's work experience in the editorial and news production desks of Vanguard newspapers spanning 26 years. Its theoretical underpinnings are the gatekeeping and the agenda setting theory of communication. The paper examines the routine news culture and production processes in Vanguard Media Limited, publishers of one of Nigeria's leading national daily and weekly newspapers in Lagos. Results of these routine processes include balanced and in-depth reporting of events by the newspaper establishment.

Nigerian newspapers are consciously adapting to visual design formats in their bid to appeal to consumers. These visual design methods involve the arrangement of page furniture, such as headlines, colour, and nameplates, in a way that is visually attractive and perceptive to the reader. This study sought to discover the current application of colour, headline typefaces, and point sizes, as well as nameplate designs, on four of the nation’s leading daily newspapers: Vanguard, The Punch, Daily Sun, and Leadership, from September 2014 to August 2015. Twenty-four issues of each of these titles were sampled for the study over a period of 12 months, from September 2014 to August 2015. These resulted in a sample frame of 96 issues of the selected newspapers. The population of the four daily newspapers during the period was 1,048, made up of 261 daily issues of Vanguard , 261 issues of The Punch , 263 issues of the Daily Sun, and 263 issues of Leadership . The study which was anchored in the Gestalt theory of visual perception adopted the visual analysis method of research. The methodology was chosen because it addresses a designer’s formal elements, such as visual attributes best explained in the form of colour, line, texture, and size. Data obtained from the sampled newspapers was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 20.0. The findings were that each of these newspapers paid attention to the design of its nameplate, printed the front and back pages in colour and applied bold headlines to attract the attention of readers during the period of the study.