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Tolu Ogunlesi Quotes
born 1982 Nigeria
Tolu Ogunlesi (born 3 March 1982) is a Nigerian journalist, poet, photographer, fiction writer, and blogger. Ogunlesi was appointed to the role of special assistant on digital/new media by President Muhammadu Buhari on 18 February 2016.
Nigeria Authors Bloggers Journalists Poets Also known as: Tolulope Ogunlesi
Random Tolu Ogunlesi quote
20 quotes
Sometimes a journalist needs the kind of skills that a novelist would have for things like color and background, which make a story come alive.
People are not born journalists – you may be born with such skills that help you become a better journalist, but you have to learn.
I appreciate the power of the internet in promoting literature
There is an obsession with Western media – if Western media doesn’t say it, we don’t believe it.
The most successful media businesses are the ones that best understand their audience and adapt whatever they are doing to their audience.
The role of any writer first and foremost is to write. Not talk about writing, not live on past glory, not teach writing, not create new schools of writing, not analyse writing, but WRITE.
All my life, books have always played a part
If Western media says it, then it must be true. We need to fundamentally change that kind of thinking.
As far as I’m concerned the challenge now is to take on the Indians and produce far more exciting writers and writing than them. They are not more talented than we are I think!
There is something about the sciences that I think drives many of its practitioners into art
Governments need to build confidence in the media and give them opportunities that Western governments would give their own media
I feel like my life has left the service lane and joined the highway
If journalists are as important as we say they are to any society, then we cannot afford to have them as some of the least paid members of that society.
I think that talent is not within our spheres of control
I still have it in me to write cringeworthy stuf
When you spend all your time breathing in bookshelf-wood and ageing newsprint and navigating around inked paper, maybe it’s inevitable that one ends up a writer
Much of what ends up in the media spaces, sadly, is driven by sensationalism, a desperation for attention by all means, that is sadly not limited to bloggers alone—what used to be called traditional media are just as guilty and complicit
Readers – after the fact of my writing – will point out thematic threads that they have spotted in the body of my work, and I think that is for them to do, and not for me the writer.
I have tweeted about 40,000 times in the last 3 years. Roughly 13,000 tweets per year, approximately 36 tweets per day. That’s a lot! 40,000 answers for when God asks me: “What did you do with your time on earth?”
One reason for that is the economics of it; people can’t afford to buy newspapers. And another reason is literacy; newspapers would only be able to reach a small chunk of the population. So patterns of production and consumption are not the same as in the West.
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