President of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP), Ms. Maureen Chigbo, has admonished all genuine operators in the media industry to work together to wipe out charlatans masquerading as online publishers.
She made the appeal in Lagos, Monday, November 14, at the all-important one-day roundtable attended by chieftains of the media, including members of the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria, NPAN; Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria, BON; Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE).
Themed “Media Roundtable: Deepening Media Professionalism through Co-regulation,” the event was also coordinated by former Governor of Ogun State, Aremo Segun Osoba, who was also a former managing director of Daily Times.
Chigbo urged industry leaders to build synergy among themselves to prevail on banks and other major advertisers to deny the charlatans adverts and channel same to GOCOP member-organisations, as a deliberate policy to empower the genuine online publishers and make the business self-sustaining.
She told the gathering that GOCOP, mindful of the need to raise the bar in online publishing, has instituted an in-house disciplinary committee and ombudsman mechanism to deepen professionalism and serve as a means for aggrieved members of the public to seek redress.
GOCOP has been in existence for eight years as a peer review body of online publishers who are guided by the code of ethics of journalism.