‘Graphic still resilient despite shocks in newspaper industry’
The Managing Director of the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL), Mr Kenneth Ashigbey, yesterday told members of staff of the company that despite the shocks in the newspaper industry, the company remained resilient and poised to move from being a small business to a multi-million-cedi entity.
To be able to achieve that, he urged the staff to be more proactive and come up with innovative ideas to position the company for its envisioned future.
“If we don’t position ourselves well for the future, we may be overtaken by events because smaller brands are coming up and eating up big brands. Big dinosaurs are being eaten up. If we are not proactive, the world will leave us behind,” he told the staff at a durbar in Accra.
‘Graphic has been innovative’
He said the company had been very innovative in coming up with ideas that were producing results.
On the introduction of the brands of the company in digital format, Mr Ashigbey said the staff were the best people to market the application.
Already, he said, the members of the board, as well as the executive management, had migrated onto the digital platform and urged staff to patronise and popularise the news app.
“Be the vanguards of the sale of our digital copies,” he charged the workers, adding that a team had been formed to undertake a pilot of the application and that the report of the team would be made available shortly.
Change engineering
He said the introduction of the news application was part of the change being engineered by the leadership of the company and that even though people were naturally inclined to resist change, the staff ought to embrace the innovation.
“If we all start using the digital platform, people will begin to know more about it and then we will leapfrog every challenge and make inroads,” he said.
He reported that other businesses that the company had invested in were doing well and announced that the Graphic Courier Service would soon be converted into a logistics entity.
The Chairman of the Graphic Union, Mr Henry Addo, said with the emergence of social media which had caught up with the majority of people, staff of the company should not accept the excuse that people were not reading but work to ensure that the brands of the company were reliable and responded to the needs of their publics.
Not business as usual
He said the current media environment required a lot of innovation and responsiveness to the needs of customers and that things ought not to be business as usual.
He stressed the need for the spirit of teamwork, adding: “Let us change our old ways of doing things and put our shoulders collectively to the wheel.”
The First Aiders of the company took the gathering through a practical exercise to show their readiness to act professionally in emergency situations.
The Head of Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PPME) of the St John Ambulance, Mr Frank Asempapa, said it had collaborated with the GCGL and was proud to say that in the maiden corporate First Aid Competition organised by the St John Ambulance, the team from Graphic beat Nestle Ghana to emerge the overall winners.
