From the west, east and south, the best brew in Africa was usually the one that took a good while in slow-burning fire, maturing to a frothy bliss that rewarded patience.

It was the story of good media; it always took painstaking work, many hands and heads, time and more time, and was then served to an expectant, waiting, trusting audience. Not any more.

The audiences have migrated, and the media is running helter skelter in search of them. The music has changed and one must embrace new dance styles to remain attractive.

Strangely, many of us imagine that a little change to our old dance steps will get us by. In all honesty, this is not a problem unique to Africa, but Africa does have some unique realities and opportunities going.

Where did the audiences go? They went down the digital trail. The International Telecommunications Union tells us that as of November 2015, there were 330 million Internet users in Africa out of a population of 1.1 billion. This represents a penetration rate of 28.6 per cent.

These figures mask a few sobering truths. Unpacking them reveals that even though Africa is the second-largest continent in the world by size and population, it is the last in terms of Internet penetration.

We have a 16 per cent share of the global population, but only 9.8 per cent share of the world’s Internet users.

We should also note that Internet growth is strongest in Africa, rising from 4.5 million users in 2000 to 330 million in 2015. Then there is the magical story of mobile telephony in Africa, the gadget that is disrupting every sphere of life, from banks to families to taxis to sex.

In short, the majority of Africans have yet to connect to the Internet. But they will be connecting soon and they will be reading, watching and listening to interesting stories. We, the media, should celebrate, and we can if we address the challenges ahead of us.

Six characteristics of the media landscape stand out in showing us just how challenging a task producing newspapers, television or radio in Africa today is.

First, there’s a broken audience supply pipe. At some point, loyal newspaper readers will stop buying the paper, for a raft of reasons.

Newspaper managers long figured this out and learnt to entice young people to grow into the newspaper reading habit so that when they begin earning some cash, they can replace the ones who have stopped buying.

The problem is that today’s young person, however rich, does not think newspaper content is something they should be paying for.

One reason is that news is all over the place, as you’ll see in point six below. We journalists and our bosses, in a mad rush to embrace the digital revolution, built beautiful websites where we were only too happy to offer our stories for free.

We also notice that this new reader/viewer/listener is a lot different from the old one. S/he is very opinionated, jumps to conclusions before getting the entire story, is impatient, always seems to be doing more than one thing at a time (leading to an attention deficit), and may be living thousands of miles away.

Second, the digital audience is promiscuous. It used to be that every newspaper had its core audience, made up of those people for whom the day did not start or end unless they would read their paper.

Their relationship was so close that they took it as a personal affront if the editor dared move the Letters section from page 11 to page 13.

They loved it so much they wouldn’t ever pick up the rival paper. These readers were the rock of the newspaper; even the shareholders paid attention. Today, they are a highly endangered species.

In their place, we have the newcomers who are fewer in number and forage in a variety of news websites to compare information and to fill in gaps. They come to your website a dozen times a day. They are vociferous in the comments section and on social media.

They are also fair; they do to you what they do to your competitors. Worse, media managers know of no sure way to monetise them.

Third, a disloyal talent. The fast pace of news demands that we put on staff; a journalist who is an expert on the subject matter, churns out copy quickly, has mastered the smartphone as a reporting tool, and can write, photograph and shoot video.

Problem is such a person doesn’t exist; a few come close but they are in such demand we can no longer afford them.

Many may have almost the entire skill set, but the digital revolution also came with something that smart people now call disintermediation.

In short, it is the elimination of the gatekeeper from the source-to-audience communication sequence. Hence in real terms, that skill set is not only sought after by newsrooms, but also by politicians and brands investing in producing audience-ready messages.

So you find that instead of specialising in press releases and media events, PR agencies now keep whole newsrooms while politicians put reporters on their staff. And they pay better!

The quality of newsroom talent has also been distorted by interest peddlers who will stop at nothing in their quest to influence editorial content.

No need to deny it, they will find willing collaborators who sell their ethics for eight pieces of silver. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, but it has grown worse especially in territories where strong media institutions are few or rare.

Fourth, there is a shrinking bank balance in a pot of interests. Media is only good business if the audience trusts its word, and that trust is earned by a currency called independence.

It is also true that the same independence brings a host of problems with advertisers, government officials, politicians, criminals and even shareholders.

In a situation like now when many media houses are sailing through rough economic waters, media chiefs often find themselves under pressure to bend to the whims of these interests, but they also know that too much of this will deliver them to the very same grave they are trying to avoid. These pressures work in concert to erode trust and further disenfranchise media audiences.

Fifth, where did the time go? We used to have a whole day to produce a daily newspaper, and our readers were patient enough to wait until the following morning to learn about what happened yesterday.

The viewer and listener would come to us by standing appointment when we ran the bulletins. On the odd day when a particularly big story broke, we would quickly publish a special edition in the afternoon and shout breaking news on air.

With the luxury of time, we sculpted clever phrases and checked all the facts. We fished just the right picture/footage from the darkroom and chased every relevant document.

Today, the newsmakers serve it directly to the audience. Since we cannot afford the experienced journalist and s/he wouldn’t be quick anyway, we make do with the greenhorn or intern. In our rage to keep pace, we rush to press and to air, and end up as competing conveyor belts and amplifiers.

And sixth, news became democratised and commoditised.

Anybody can deliver the news whether it is written by themselves or by the reliable copy/paste function. Or indeed by robots.

Hence, we have multiple sources without multiple voices, resulting in an unending echo of timelines. If it is not unique, perish the thought of ever selling it.

To make it unique you will need expensive talent and expensive infrastructure. In the age of shrinking profit margins and competing investment options, the media is scurrying for the business model that will deliver the bacon to the shareholder and fund quality journalism all at once.

Ultimately, all questions boil down to how we define quality journalism and how we fund it.

Does the media sell content or audiences? What model do we use and can media houses continue to run as businesses or do we get the charities and tax payers on board?

Mr Otieno is the managing editor for Digital and Convergence at the Nation Media Group.